


ARROWS & TRAPS

by apolliades, lapoesieestdanslarue



Category: Inception (2010), Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Theatre, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Shakespeare, Unrequited Love, it's a theatre au!!, with copious shakespeare references and melodramatic love affairs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 11:32:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14307741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolliades/pseuds/apolliades, https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoesieestdanslarue/pseuds/lapoesieestdanslarue
Summary: “You want to do Hamlet?”“Stop looking like I pissed in your coffee, Arthur,” Dom sighs, flicking through the arts section of the newspaper, going straight to the reviews, scoping out competition. “I think it would be good for the company.”“But two tragedies back to back--”“--is what would make a name for ourselves.”(Wherein Arthur is just trying to do Shakespeare justice, Tommy Shelby is a thorn in his side, Eames is useless, Dom is running a circus and the tragedy doesn’t stop at the stage.)





	1. ACT ONE

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _'"Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.'_ \- Much Ado About Nothing (III, i, 106)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In fair New York, where we set our scene.
> 
> _DRAMATIS PERSONAE:_
> 
>  **ARTHUR** \- TRAGIC ELITIST (PRIZE WANKER)
> 
>  **EAMES** \- OBLIVIOUS ROMANTIC HERO (SEE ABOVE, VERSION ANGLAISE)
> 
>  **TOMMY SHELBY** \- FRACTURED SOUL
> 
>  **ARIADNE** \- GENUINELY JUST HERE FOR A GOOD TIME (DIDN’T GET THAT ROLE ON THAT ONE SOAP SO IS NOW CHANNELLING THAT INTO MELODRAMATIC SHAKESPEARE)
> 
>  **DOM** \- RELIVING HIS GLORY DAYS AS AN _ACTOR_ (ALSO TRYING NOT TO BE TOO EMO ABOUT HIS DEAD WIFE)
> 
>  **MAL** \- HIS DEAD WIFE
> 
>  **YUSUF** \- REALLY, GUYS, I GET THAT YOU’RE GOING WITH THE WHOLE BLOOD SYMBOLISM THING BUT THERE’S ONLY SO MANY RED LIGHTS I CAN USE (REALLY DONE WITH EVERYONE’S SHIT)

**ACT ONE**

**ENTER THE STICK UP ARTHUR’S ARSE**

* * *

 

 **[pointman left a review of Dreamshare’s production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth]**  
_25/02/2017_

I don’t really know what to expect from Dreamshare Theatre Company anymore. In their heyday, they produced well-executed, true-to-form Shakespearean drama. With a good ensemble (including Dominick Cobb, who’s now taken over as company director) their productions never strayed from as close to perfect as possible.

But their latest run of _Macbeth_ leaves a lot to be desired. Mostly due to the introduction of Thomas Shelby as the title character. Though everything around Shelby was technically flawless, his performance was overly forthcoming and intense, making the tension seem convoluted and melodramatic. Honestly, I think Alfred Eames could have done a better job than Shelby, and that’s saying something.

He’s not even a trained actor, for Christ’s sake.

 

* * *

  

“You want to do Hamlet?”

“Stop looking like I pissed in your coffee, Arthur,” Dom sighs, flicking through the arts section of the newspaper, going straight to the reviews, scoping out competition. “I think it would be good for the company.”

“But two tragedies back to back--”  
  
“--is what would make a name for ourselves.”

“It’s his masterpiece, Dom. You can’t just say ‘I think we should do _Hamlet_.’ You don’t think about Hamlet, you commit to it, fully and bravely and with time and thought.”

Dom drags his eyes from whatever play Kimber is slating this week. “You’re a very strange man, do you know that?”

Arthur ignores that, and runs a hand through his perfectly gelled hair. “I mean, rehearsals would have to start in a week if we wanted to make it for summer opening. How are we going to drum up enough talent for auditions--”

Now Dom really does look at Arthur, as if he’s the confused one. “We’re not holding auditions.”

The coffee cup that had been halfway to his lips is slowly lowered. Arthur stares back at Dom and tries to find the glint in his eyes that says he’s joking. “What do you mean, we’re not holding auditions?”

“The company is fine as is.”

“The company is far from fine,” Arthur splutters. “Sure, Ariadne will do Ophelia justice, that was never in question, but you seriously think Eames can carry ‘to be’?”

“No,” Dom acquiesces, and for a brief, glorious moment, Arthur breathes a sigh of relief. Until he says, “Tommy can.”

If his jaw clenched any harder his teeth would be in danger of breaking. He turns his focus to taking slow, controlled breaths through his nose. “You’re not serious. You’re saying that to get a rise out of me.”

“No,” Dom says again. Has he forgotten how to say anything else?

“Then I don’t-- I don’t even know how to begin to tell you how wrong that is. His age, for a start-- Hamlet isn’t _thirty_ , Dom! You know how intrinsic his youth is to his character--”

“He’s younger than you,” Dom points out.

“By a year and two months,” Arthur snaps. “And I wouldn’t put myself forward for that role either. He just played Macbeth. You don’t go _from_ Macbeth _to_ Hamlet. It’s-- it’s _perverse_.”

Dom laughs, and for just a moment Arthur is on the verge of seeing red.

“You were just complaining that he’s melodramatic. Isn’t Hamlet the epitome of melodramatic?”

“Have you read the play?!”

Sighing, Dom gives up on his paper and folds it, slaps it down on the coffee table. “Yes, Arthur, I’ve read _Hamlet_. I’ve read all of Shakespeare’s works, just like you have, because we studied _Shakespeare_ together. Do you remember that? Seriously, what’s your problem with this?”

“I would have thought you might be a bit more sympathetic,” Arthur says, bitter and biting, a horrible, horrible way to deal with the nausea that’s rising in his gut. “Considering what happened with Mal.”

Dom does what he always does when Mal is brought up in conversation: sniffs, clenches his jaw and tilts his neck, a kind of nervous tick that’s developed over the years.

“That was a long time ago, Arthur,” he says quietly. There’s a moment, briefly, when Arthur’s heart falls to his stomach and he really does feel bad, because Dom gets that look in his eyes that shows him slipping, slowly, from the present, being dragged back into the past, to intoxicating memories of Mal. But the moment’s lost, as Dom shakes his head and gives Arthur a scrutinising look. Straightening, he takes the subject off the table altogether with little more than an adjustment of his posture. “Be careful. You’re starting to sound superstitious. Next thing you’ll be screaming whenever anyone says ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre.”

Arthur frowns. “This isn’t superstition, Dom. This is me telling you what a quantifiable mistake you’re making. He’s practically unhinged as is--”

“All actors are. And Tommy’s not that bad. Don’t try to tell me you’re suddenly concerned for his welfare.”

“His Macbeth was completely fractured--”

“--Macbeth _is_ fractured--”

“--and you think he’s going to be able to hold it together as Hamlet?”

“Has it ever occured to you that he might actually know what he’s doing?” Dom holds his hand up, silencing Arthur’s rebuttal. “I know he’s not a trained actor, but Arthur, seriously. Whatever your problem with him is, you’ve got to get over it. He knows his stuff, he knows Shakespeare-- Christ, he’s the best thing to happen to this company since Ariadne. You saw the reviews, you have to realise how well he’s being received.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Arthur mutters, maybe a little petulant, but this whole thing has just gone from bad to worse.

“I don’t care if you don’t like it, it’s happening. Drink your tea, we’re meeting the team in fifteen.”

 

* * *

 

Walking through the stage door, up the stairs into the little rehearsal rooms the Beckett theatre holds, Arthur can’t help but go over the events of this morning, each word replaying itself in his head over and over and over again. Truly, Arthur can’t comprehend Dom’s decision. Not that he ever could, not since the night he first met him, this time last year.

 

* * *

 

He manifests out of the darkness like some kind of eldritch vision, like he’s stepped straight out of the pages of the script onto the stage with no intermediary. Cloaked in blood and chainmail, as black as the shadows from which he emerged, his eyes are almost silver and are the only points of light in his face. The dagger is in his right hand and Arthur can feel the keenness of its blade at the sight of it alone. Atop his head rests the crown, gilded gold and heavy with guilt. For a moment those silver eyes stare right through his skull, like he isn’t there, and in that moment Arthur isn’t quite sure which of them is the ghost.

“You must be Arthur,” Thomas Shelby says then, and smiles. It’s the smile of a wolf; there’s even blood between his teeth. It doesn’t come close to his eyes but then, neither does Arthur’s. The living apparition holds out a hand to shake, as if to prove he’s flesh and bone. “Tommy Shelby.”

Arthur looks down at Tommy’s hand, stained red. He doesn’t offer his own -- his shirt is expensive, and white. There’s a pause before Tommy’s gaze follows his and he laughs, a short, oddly hollow sound. It’s jarring, coming from a man who looks like he should be in the middle of a battlefield four hundred years ago. “Right. Sorry.” His hand falls to his side. Arthur’s aware that he’s been staring silently for a good minute now but he can’t seem to make his mouth form words. “Pleased to meet you, anyway.”

He puts up a good façade, Arthur has to give him that: he sounds almost like he means it. But Arthur himself has spent enough time fabricating believable pleasantries to be able to recognise it in someone else. He smiles thinly. “Likewise.”

  

* * *

 

The memory slips quietly from his mind, already fuzzy at the edges by the time Arthur has dropped his laptop off at the makeshift office and made it down to the theatre, where rehearsals are already in full swing. Which, truly, Arthur tries not to let grate on him too much despite the fact that, historically, when Dom rushes head first into these things they tend to go about as well as a trainwreck and, frankly, Arthur can’t let that happen. Not to Shakespeare. Not to Hamlet.

“Eames.”

He’s halfway back in the theatre seats with his ankles crossed on the row in front, which irritates Arthur a bit (even though he’s been known to do it himself) but not enough for him to do anything about it. Were he in a better mood he might shove his legs off to get a rise out of him, but he finds himself lacking the energy. And Eames is so focused on the stage, besides, he’s not sure if he’d even notice.

“Eames.”

Arthur’s right beside him now and he doesn’t so much as twitch to show he’s heard.

“Prick,” Arthur mutters to himself, then nudges him harder than necessary on the shoulder. Having to repeat himself isn’t something he’s accustomed to and he has precious little patience for it. “ _Eames_.”

Finally the bastard shows some sign of life; lets his head roll to the side and raises his eyebrows in Arthur’s direction, though his gaze only leaves the rehearsal below for half a second. It’s infuriating. “My apartment,” Arthur hisses into his ear. He doesn’t quite mean to make it sound like more of a threat than an invitation but it does seem to come out that way. “Nine tonight.”

“Mm? Yes, fine.” Eames doesn’t even deign to look at him when he speaks. Arthur fights the urge to seize him and make him. “As you like.” Oblivious to Arthur fuming quietly beside him, Eames makes a vague gesture towards the stage, where Tommy reclines with his brow on Ariadne’s knee. Dom is pacing back and forth before them, stopping now and then to look at them from various angles. “What do you think of the blocking, here? It seems off to me. Should I say something to Dom?”

Arthur leaves without answering. He doesn’t imagine Eames would notice whether he gave one or not.

 

* * *

 

In his tiny, rented apartment, which always feels smaller when he comes back from London, Arthur is staring out of the window. Below him the streets haven’t changed but the cast of characters has, a constantly revolving carousel of foreign faces. On his shitty little hob pasta is slow to come to the boil, and Arthur frowns as he ruminates. The people on the street walk by, none the wiser.

 

* * *

 

Despite what some might say, Arthur isn’t a total arsehole. And though his first meeting with Tommy Shelby was formidable enough, he’s willing to give him another chance. Seriously, he is -- actors are fickle things. Just look at Christian Bale.

The theatre they’re opening _Macbeth_ in is in London, and impossibly small. Though Dom argued it added to the intimacy and claustrophobia, Arthur argued it was definitely in violation of at least ten health codes and also, with no disrespect, a shithole.

Nonetheless, with only minimal grumbling, Arthur takes his seat beside Eames and Ariadne and watches as Tommy takes the stage. Craning his head back, Arthur asks Dom, “What are his credentials?”

“He started off with the Icarus Theatre Collective and came to us after I saw him in _Twelfth Night_ ,” Dom whispers back.

“And where’d he study?”

“He didn’t.”

Ice seizes Arthur’s veins as he flings himself upright, nearly giving himself whiplash. “He _what_?”

Dom sighs -- which is an annoyingly common occurrence in their conversations -- and squeezes the bridge of his nose. “He didn’t exactly go to an acting school--”

“What do you mean, ‘ _exactly_ ’?” Arthur demands.

“Well, he didn’t go at all-- but, Arthur, just wait till you see him,” Dom insists.

“Where did he go, what did he study, then? At least tell me it was something in the Arts. English? Theatre Studies? Fuck, even _Film_ \--”

“He didn’t go to university. He joined the army straight from school.”

Silence falls, then. Arthur stares at Dom, searching for the joke. Dom’s never been as good an actor as he is a director so there ought to be a giveaway, but to his horror he realises there isn’t one. There’s no joke. This is real. Oh god, this is real. This is really happening, right now, to him. Like a near death experience, snippets of his life starts to flash before his eyes, except instead of memories, it’s things he loves. And instead of all the brilliant, flawless, perfect productions he’s seen, all he can see is Macbeth, slipping through his fingers.

His crisis is interrupted then by Eames, the bastard. “Close your mouth, darling,” he drawls, lazy like a Sunday morning, unaffected by Arthur’s agony. “You’ll catch flies.”

“Eames, I swear to--” Arthur cuts himself off, trying to compose the last strands he has left of himself. “Are you okay with this?” he asks both Eames and Ariadne, sotto voce. “He’s not trained, he’s-- he’s a public liability! Don’t you have any respect for anything sacred?” He says this only to Eames now, with mild disgust in his voice. “You went to RADA, didn’t you? You should understand the value of decent training--”

“Yes, Arthur, I went to RADA, and it taught me only contempt for people like you,” Eames answers, grinning like a cat. “I say we give the boy a chance. Lord knows Cobb has at least some capacity for spotting talent. He cast me.”

“Exactly.”

Eames laughs. “And Ariadne. You like Ariadne.”

Arthur has to give him that one. Ariadne, at least, has performed consistently faultlessly, though Arthur has concerns about how headstrong she can be, worries she’s at risk of letting her own perceptions and interpretations get the better of her, rather than simply channeling them with respect for and deference to the playwright’s intentions, as he feels she and all actors should. Arthur still shivers when he thinks about the fight they had over _The Taming of the Shrew_.

“That’s beside the point. You’re talking about putting an inexperienced, untrained army vet into your title role.”

“Method acting!”

“Dom, tell me you’re joking.”

“I--”

_“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”_

Immediately they all pitch their eyes forward to the stage, where Tommy’s lone figure stands illuminated only by a single light. Even from ten rows back (of only twenty), the confined quarters of the theatre mean that every minute shift in Tommy’s face is visible.

His voice is low, not overbearing. He stands, still, eyes fluttering closed, hands by his side until one reaches out, touches a phantom ghost of something beyond them that they can’t see. That isn’t for them to see.

_“To the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”_

In the pale, bright light, the shadows that fall on his face hollow the dips and edges of his face, and in that casting he’s not unlike a sculpture, or a dead man walking.

Suddenly his face twists, eyes screwing shut, pain and sorrow painted all over him and it’s--

It’s only a bit enchanting. In the darkest sense of the word, like watching something be lost to a void, watching something descend to darkness.

 _“Out, out, brief candle!”_ Tommy’s hands are clenched around the back of his neck, desperate. His voice has risen, cloying and fractured against the stillness of the room. _“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”_

Suddenly, his eyes fly open, and distantly Arthur thinks he registers Ariadne gasp. Their bright, icy blue pierces through the barrier between audience and actor. He drops to his knees, head tilted back-- it’s sorrow, Arthur realises. It’s anger and frustration and war and pain and the whole human condition, it’s Macbeth, living, breathing.

 _“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.”_ He swallows, bowing his head, under the weight of a crown that doesn’t need to be seen to be felt. _“Signifying nothing.”_

There’s a beat of silence, wherein they all drink it up, reeling from the impact of it all. Tommy comes back to himself slowly, in stages, sucking in one shaky breath and then petering out, evening. He looks a little dazed at first, like he’s waking up in a room he doesn’t remember falling asleep in, waiting for recognition to return to him.

Arthur turns back to Dom, and scowls, stomach twisting with something sharp as the edge of a knife. “Well, he looks like he needs a Valium.”

Dom groans and Ariadne scoffs. “Arthur, maybe if you took the stick out of your ass for five seconds and opened your mind to the concept that a Performing Arts degree isn’t the only thing that makes an actor, you’d be able to appreciate the performance more.”

He turns to Eames, but it’s no use; the man has eyes only for the stage, and the lone soldier on it.

 

* * *

  

“You cooked.” Eames casts an eye over the plates on Arthur’s pristine kitchen table with a bemused frown that Arthur doesn’t much appreciate.

“Yes,” he snaps, lifting the pan of tagliatelle to drain it in the sink. He very briefly entertains the idea of accidentally spilling hot water on Eames’ scuffed brogues, but resists the urge to carry it out. “Did you think I photosynthesised?”

Eames laughs softly, puts his jacket over the back of a chair and helps himself to a generous glass of Chianti. “No, I rather imagined you just plug yourself in to charge when your batteries start to run low.”

Arthur can’t help but notice that his quip is delivered with uncharacteristic gentleness, which makes him uncomfortable; there’s something lacking in Eames’ voice that he can’t put his finger on because he’s only just noticing it now that it’s gone. He plates the pasta without responding, only looks at Eames again when he sits down opposite him. “Your sparkling wit is wasted on tragedies, Eames,” he says without inflection.

Eames laughs but he offers no repartee, and the silence is maddening. Arthur lets his fork scrape against his plate just for the sake of making them both wince, just to get some kind of reaction, anything. Some fucking sign that Eames is actually here with him, that he’s in the room more than just physically. But he’s gazing at some point past his shoulder with a faraway look in his eyes that’s driving Arthur to distraction, just sipping his wine. He’s on an entirely different planet.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says eventually, putting down his knife. “Is there something on your mind?”

“Hm?” As if waking from a dream, Eames starts ever so slightly, and finally looks at him properly. He smiles, this slow, secretive, knowing smile that looks beautiful on his soft mouth, and that Arthur hates. “No, darling, nothing. Actually, I wanted to ask you--”

And he starts up on some discussion about the blocking of the opening scene, which Arthur gets the distinct impression is for his benefit more than Eames’ own. Something about it seems shallow, disconnected, and after a while Arthur can’t stand it anymore so he gets up, crosses to Eames’ side of the table, threads his fingers into his hair to tip his head back and kisses him just to make him stop. His lips are stained with wine and a trace of words unspoken that Arthur can’t seem to overwrite even when he sinks in his teeth. His hands are warm on Arthur’s waist but his touch is too light, static, passive; it’s Arthur who takes him by the wrist and leads him to the bedroom, Arthur who unbuttons his own shirt.

He feels Eames watching him afterwards, for a while, as he pretends to sleep. Then hears him sigh, feels it brush against his bare shoulder, hears him turn away. It’s a long time before Arthur hears his breathing even out, though, and far longer after that before he falls asleep himself.

In the morning Eames is already awake when Arthur opens his eyes, which is a little unsettling simply for how unusual it is. He’s gazing at the ceiling, doesn’t even turn when Arthur stirs.

“I dreamt I was in love.” He speaks slowly, softly but clearly, without the drowsiness of someone just after waking.

Arthur feels his stomach turn. He grimaces, lets his disgust show in the downward twist of his mouth. “How awful.”

Eames laughs. Arthur is torn between wanting to punch him in the mouth and wanting to kiss him. “I know.”

He swallows uneasily, and glances at the clock by his bedside locker. He still has time for a shower, in which perhaps Eames will deign to join him, and breakfast.

“I’m going for a shower,” he announces, and when Eames answers with a noncommittal grunt Arthur represses a sigh. His loss. “There’s leftovers in the fridge for you.”

“Too kind, darling,” is Eames’ response, but it’s distant, far away, lost to Arthur in a place he could never hope to reach.

He takes a cold shower, bracing himself against the cool, white tiles as the water pours down on top of him. It’s stupidly masochistic, and not ideal for the bleak midwinter of New York, but it’s an exercise in self control. He still has that. That’s all he’ll ever have.

When he comes out, Eames has left. He goes to the kitchen numbly, not expecting to find a note, not expecting to find anything except an empty coffee mug by the sink, but there isn’t even that. The room is as immaculate as he left it. Eames might as well have been a ghost -- there isn’t a shred of evidence he was ever here at all, except that the leftovers are still in the fridge, untouched, enough for two. Arthur stands with the fridge open until the chill makes him shiver, searching for some kind of logic to explain why the sight of it hurts because if he can explain it he can understand it and if he can understand it he can deal with it and put it aside.

There’s nothing. “Stupid fucking bastard,” he mutters, and slams the fridge door so hard the whole room rattles.

Arthur can’t understand the pain that rips through his stomach in answer to that.

 

* * *

 

**END OF ACT 1**

 


	2. ACT TWO

**ACT 2**

**THAT’S PRINCE OF DANES TO YOU, ARTHUR**

 

* * *

 

  
“It’s nothing short of disgusting.”

Not even disgusting-- offensive. Abhorrent. Perverse. The mere _idea_ of what Dom is suggesting is poetic murder. It’s like the sorry excuse that is _10 Things I Hate About You._ Or, perish the thought, that 2013 version of _Romeo and Juliet_.

Arthur understands that Shakespeare plays are meant to be dynamic and adaptable, and he can appreciate that when practiced with appropriate restraint. What Dom is suggesting is a glorified fuck-you to historical accuracy in favour of a petty ploy for shock value.

“You’re not doing this to him. I won’t let you.”

Dom massages his temple, eyes shut. “Arthur, I’m not doing anything to him, I’m just shining a bit of light on--”

“On a fictional relationship you’ve plucked out of your ass!”

From his place in the actors’ circle, Eames guffaws. “Come now, Arthur, surely even you can’t be blind to ‘goodnight, sweet prince’.”

“Horatio was Hamlet’s _friend_ ,” Arthur defends. This is not a conversation he ever thought he’d have to have-- not with people he’d assumed to be logical and sane. “Not some torrid love affair!”

“He tries to kill himself to be with Hamlet, for fuck’s sake.” Eames shoots back.

“Are you _blind_ or did you intentionally miss the part where Hamlet says to Ophelia ‘never doubt I love’?”

“Yes, Arthur, well done. ‘Never doubt I love’, not ‘never doubt I love _thee_ ’. Why do you have to be so uptight about--”

Before he can reply, Dom steps forward, calling for silence. In the ten minutes since they’d begun, he looks like he’s aged twenty years. “Arthur, I’m beginning to forget why we let you come to rehearsals. Can any of you remember why we let him come here?”

“His enlightening insights?” Ariadne offers, dryly.

“His uncanny ability to raise morale?” chimes in Eames.

Arthur rounds on him. “Now is not the time for your pathetic attempts at humour,” he snaps, before directing the full force of his glare back to Dom. “You cannot force your contrived fantasies into this play just because you think it would be interesting. This isn’t _Brokeback_ fucking _Mountain_. And don’t even try to tell me this is some kind of misguided bid for diversity points. Hamlet was written in the seventeenth century--”

“So was ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’,” Eames interrupts, helpful as always, tone infuriatingly matter-of-fact. “Which, you know, was about a boy. Didn’t they teach you that at Columbia, Arthur?”

“Eames, for once could you stay out of--”

“What’s the problem, Arthur?” Tommy’s voice is soft against Arthur’s brash and raised one, but it’s still strong enough to command attention. “Is it the idea of tampering with the script that upsets you, or a romantic relationship between two men?”

“Don’t start that. Don’t try to make out like I’m homophobic because I don’t think Hamlet and Horatio should be swapping spit through the final scene.”

“Nobody said anything about swapping--”

“It was fucking _hyperbole_.”

“I didn’t think you’d have such a problem with this!” Dom says, gesticulating wildly. “Isn’t this what you— Arthur, you’re gay, surely you’d understand?”

“Arthur’s gay?” Tommy says, smirking like a shark that’s smelt blood.

“As Christmas,” Eames mutters.

“That’s neither here nor damn well there, you-- this is intolerable.” He screws his eyes shut and pinches the bridge of his nose, hard. “I can’t, you know what-- I’m done. I’m done.”

He turns on his heel and walks away, storming off stage. As he retreats in all his righteous fury, the voices carry through.

“Well, that’s our first tantrum done and dusted,” says a voice like Dom.

“And a month early,” Ariadne retorts.

Then, in Tommy’s unmistakable Birmingham burr, the final insult. “What… was he actually doing here in the first place?”

 

* * *

 

 

Arthur lets a harsh breath out through his nose, tapping his pen impatiently against the pristine white of his notebook.

“Are you sure that--”

Daisy, the costume designer, whips her head around and silences him with a look. “Arthur, be very fucking careful what you say to me next.”

He doesn’t gulp. He _doesn’t_. It’s just that she has tattoos and piercings and a very strong Brooklyn accent and Arthur has a shred of self preservation left to his name.

Ariadne gives him a look, Tommy casts him a sideways glance, and Eames, from wherever he’s flouncing about, makes some throwaway comment about Arthur, his balls, and knowing what’s good for him.

But then Daisy breaks out Ophelia’s dress, and he just can’t.

“Daisy, you’re amazing and I love you, but in the brief I sent you I specifically noted that white lace would not have been mainstream in Denmark in the 17th century. This isn’t fucking Les Mis, we have to get every detail right to create a rich tapestry--”

“You’re a rich tapestry,” Ariadne mutters.

“Arthur,” Daisy says, in her sickly sweet voice. “I’m going to explain something to you, because you didn’t actually study costume design. I get that Shakespeare is important to you, but not everyone in the five fucking Burroughs cares about what exact fabric was in fashion in the stone age. My job is to make sure that every subtle facet of the character is translated onto the characters, to give the audience an immediate impression of them on sight. That’s my job, not yours. So sit down, shut up and go gripe about it on whatever Reddit page you run.”

Arthur is, quite frankly, hurt and offended. He wouldn’t touch Reddit with a ten-foot pole; he’s not a bitchy teenager, nor is he a balding video-game enthusiast with questionable facial hair.

Ariadne huffs. “Stop moping, Arthur. It’ll highlight her youth, her innocence, her naivety.”

“Why don’t you just have her stride out in a wedding gown?”

“Don’t joke. Dom might hear you and get ideas.”

“At least that idea might have context,” he grumbles.

Daisy rolls her eyes. “Arthur, c’mon. You’re not usually such a pain in the ass about this shit. Look-- we’re gonna have different versions for each scene, getting muddier from the bottom until she’s drenched in it. Get it? It’s symbolism, Arthur. You love symbolism.” She turns to Ariadne. “I’ve got your measurements, you can sit down. You--” She gestures in Tommy’s direction as Ariadne hops off the stool. “Up. Shirt off. We don’t have all day and I still have to show Arthur the shoes.”

Tommy pulls himself off the chair, elegant as a cat and strides -- seriously, he _strides_ \-- to the centre of the room. It’s ridiculous, the way he manages to command the room even in the simple act of unbuttoning his shirt. He looks like an advert for cologne, like there should be an underfed and over-bleached woman swooning at his feet. Arthur glances to Eames and his lip curls at the expression of unblinking focus on his face, directed at Tommy only.

Well, at least that answers the question of what Eames sees in him. He’s unrealistically fit, in the way that real people just aren’t. Not huge, but exquisitely proportioned, sculpted in pale marble and flawed only by black ink that doesn’t even have the decency to look out of place; instead, the rays of sun on his pectoral are enhancing. And then… then, he turns his back. Beside him, Ariadne suddenly goes very still, as Arthur’s muscles are pulled taut. What the tattoo had covered his bare skin can’t. An exit wound. A bullet wound. Ugly and scarred over, it’s raised and mottled against the rest of his porcelain skin.

Tommy turns and meets Arthur’s eyes. His eyes follow Arthur’s direction, glancing down at his shoulder. “Iraq,” he says, a mere rasp. “2008.”

“Did it hurt?” Ariadne asks, quiet.

“Yes,” Tommy replies, brutally honest in a way that makes Arthur flinch.

“Does it still?”

“Yes.” His eyes still haven’t moved from Arthur, and they narrow with a biting grin. A taunt. _Invite me into your house so that I might burn it down. Watch me make my pain into art._

Moving deftly around him, Daisy’s measuring tape runs like ribbons across the plains of Tommy’s chest.

“Do you want to keep the dog tags on?” She asks him.

Tommy’s hand fly to the smooth metal tabs that lie on his chest, strung on a busted and old metal chain. Absently, he rubs a thumb over their raised indentations, tracing each letter. “Yes,” he answers, the same time that Arthur says “Absolutely not.”

Tommy’s eyes turn cold, hardening as his hand clamps over the pendants. Daisy shifts her weight uneasily, biting her lip. “Arthur, c’mon,” she says, her earlier bite gone. “It’s no big deal, I can hide it--”

“Yeah, at the expense of the continuity of--”

“Arthur.” The voice that speaks is new to the room- it’s Eames. Loud, clear, defiant. “Let the man keep his dog tags on.” He levels Arthur with a look. “Hamlet’s hard enough as is.”

“Wait, I… think I actually agree with Arthur,” Ariadne pipes up from her chair. “What’s the deal? Why can’t he just take them off?”

Tommy sighs, tipping his head back, impatient and uneasy, as Eames walks into the room. “In the olden days of yore, when people really did believe in witches and ghosts, Shakespeare’s actors would often find themselves possessed by their characters, manifestations of fierce bouts of paranoia that their souls couldn’t be washed clean of their character’s evil, that spirits really would rise from the dead to ask vengeance, that an enemy might pluck their eyes out. So good ol’ Billy Shakes came up with this little genius.”

Reaching into his trouser pocket, Eames produces a single red poker chip, flipping it deftly around his fingers. “They call them totems. They were mostly used for the tragedies, for obvious reasons, which is why they’re not so widely known outside of Shakespearean productions. They act as a tether, really. A tether the actor can connect himself to, to remind himself what’s real and what isn’t. What’s the character and what’s him.”

Eames flips the chip and catches it between two fingers. “That’s why he needs the dogtags, Ariadne. God knows the rest of us do. Even Arthur has one.”

“You do? What is it?” Against his will Arthur feels his face heat as she turns to look at him. It only takes her a second to realise she’s not going to get anything from him, though, and redirects her attention to Eames. “Can I see that?”

“Ah ah ah,” Eames protests. “That’s the golden rule. Looking is one thing, if it all, but you can’t touch it. What makes it sacred, then? What makes this my poker chip, and not yours?”

The room is weighted with silence as Eames’ question hangs heavy in the air. Arthur can feel his die digging into his thigh, feels it burn his skin red hot with shame and fury.

Tommy interrupts the interlude with all the grace of a baby elephant with a broken leg. “Can I keep my fucking tags or what?”

All eyes fly to to Arthur, and he swallows, shifting in his chair. “He can keep the tags,” he relents. “Only if it doesn’t interfere with the costume. If it does, just-- make a pocket, or something. And you should get one too.” Arthur turns to Ariadne. “I’m serious. This isn’t some stupid superstition. Do yourself the favour and just… Make it easier for yourself.”

Ariadne frowns at him. “What is it, like garlic against vampires?”

Eames clucks his tongue, smiling bitterly. “More like protection against Dom.”

Sitting upright, her brows pull together in worry. “What does that mean?”

“It’s nothing,” Daisy reassures her, before clearing her throat and continuing on with Tommy’s measurements. “Actors and their neuroses.”

Arthur shoots a glare at Eames, who shrugs in response, unrepentant. “Ignore him.”

From his place on the stool Tommy still hasn’t moved an inch. His ice blue eyes lock onto Arthur, without yield and demanding answers. “You’re talking about Malorie, aren’t you?” He asks, low and long, like the drag of a cigarette.

Arthur looks him back, right in the eye. It doesn’t have the same effect it might have on someone else. It’s hard to quiver at the sight of your own reflection. “That’s none of your business.”

The bastard rolls eyes, and has the audacity to smile, smug. “Mate, it was the whole fucking worlds.”

Ariadne’s neat features are pinched with a blend of concern and intrigue. “Mal as in Dom’s dead wife?”

“Mal as in Dom’s dead wife,” Eames confirms, helpfully, “Who killed herself mid-production because he let her get in too deep.” He relays this information with a kind of matter-of-fact expression that might’ve been disturbing to anyone else, and only a light trace of disapproval.

“Eames, she was already ill,” Arthur argues, but Ariadne cuts across him, her voice pitching up.

“She was rehearsing Ophelia before she died?”

Eames, under his breath, delivers the felling blow: “While.”

At this point Arthur is painfully aware of the futility of his attempts at de-escalating the situation, but he continues anyway, out of an inability to back down more than anything else.

He holds up his hands in a pacifying gesture. “Ariadne, seriously. Don’t worry about it. She’d just had James and she… She wasn’t coping well with it all. And Dom wasn’t coping with her not coping and it was… It was a vicious cycle. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. He didn’t go into this lightly, okay?” He tries not to dwell on the fact that that might be the biggest lie he’s ever told. “He knows what he’s doing, and more importantly you seem to be perfectly sane, which Mal was not. You’re going to be fine, Ariadne. Nothing’s going to happen.”

Standing on the lone stool, Tommy is silent and unmoving, lost to the commotion around them. He’s gone from them, retreated into the crevices of his mind and lines and lines of Shakespeare and sorrow. His hand is clenched so tightly around the tags still, soon he won’t need to wear them anymore: the words will be branded onto his skin.

 

* * *

 

 

  
“You shouldn’t have done that.”

The voice comes from the dark, and Eames has serious mind to start screaming, but the instinct is quelled as Tommy steps out from the shadows, resting himself against the doorframe of his dressing room. Beneath the dark fan of his lashes Tommy’s staring at him, dog tags in hand, wrapped around his fist like a rosary.

“Do you always have to make such a dramatic entrance?” Eames bleats, chest oh-so-slightly heaving from the fright he’s pretending he hadn’t gotten. “And don’t you have a home to go to?”

Tommy flashes him a sharp, dangerous grin. “Don’t you?” He asks, before stepping forward. “I mean it, though. I don’t need you to protect me.”

“I wasn’t--”

“Arthur’s all bark and no bite,” Tommy continues. “I’m not scared of him. I don’t need to be, and I don’t need you fighting my fucking battles for me. I can bend Arthur’s will on my own.”

Eames chuckles and rolls his eyes. “I realise that. But at least when I do it I’ve only got half the battle.”

Tommy’s grin turns cutting as something sparks in his eyes. “I like a challenge,” he says, voice impossibly smooth for someone who’s smoking a pack a day.

“I know you do.” Eames doesn’t know why he says it so quietly, as if he’s afraid to. It sounds almost like a confession, it’s murmured with such intensity. He clears his throat and breaks the gaze, casting his glance to his shoes. It’s hard, sometimes, to look at Tommy. It’s like staring at the sun -- not in the blinding sense, but more in the way Icarus must have felt when he gazed up at it and begged to fly. A dull, pulling ache in his core, his chest, his heart, raw and real and impossibly intoxicating. “Look, I’ve worked with Arthur for a long time, I know what he’s like, I thought it would be easier if I just--”

Tommy crosses to him then and he isn’t smiling anymore. His mouth is a thin hard line that Eames struggles, now, to look away from. “If you dare presume to speak for me again, Eames,” he says, in a voice like cold water, “if you dare presume to know me.”

“Then what?” Eames isn’t sure where he finds his voice, or what exactly possessed him to talk back to a man with such fire in his eyes, except the reckless inability to hold his tongue when he really should, which has put him into far more tight spots than he’d care to admit ever since he learned to talk. “You don’t have to always play the big man,” he says quietly. “I know you-- I mean, I know what it’s like. To… to wear a mask. To play tough. I know you can hold your own, this isn’t about that. I just. I don’t presume to know you, but I want to. I know you could’ve told Arthur off, but I-- I wanted to. I won’t do it again, if it bothers you. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Tommy tells him, but his voice has lost its sharpness. His knuckles are white around the chain of his tags. “Not even close.”

Eames has already thrown caution to the wind, so what’s the harm in taking one more risk, he reasons. He covers Tommy’s hand with his own and runs his thumb over his knuckles, like he’s trying to ease out some of the tension. Tommy looks up at him sharply, but lets him. Eames takes his gaze and holds it, and moves slowly, acutely aware that he’s walking on ice that a step wrong could shatter. He lowers his head rather than lift Tommy’s hand and, with his eyes still on his, presses his mouth to his closed fist. He watches the flicker of shock cross Tommy’s face. But Tommy lets him still.

“I don’t. But I want to,” he says as he straightens.

Tommy’s controlling his breathing, even and strict. “No, Eames,” he whispers, and oh, Eames’ heart aches at the sorrow in his voice. “You don’t.” He turns their hands over, traces an absent line down Eames’ palm. He lets out a bitter laugh, barely there. “You don’t deserve that.”

“And you do?”

“Eames--”

 _“I do oppose my patience to your fury, and am armed to suffer with a quietness of spirit the very tyranny and rage of yours,”_ Eames recites, with a trace of a smile.

Tommy laughs, just once, but it’s real, this time. Happier. “You’re misquoting now. Arthur’ll have your head.”

“Let him,” Eames whispers. Tommy looks up to see a question in his eyes.

He answers, softly, with his lips pressed against Eames’.

 

* * *

 

 

“I want to run through ‘To be’.”

The door has barely finished swinging behind Dom before he’s storming down the theatre steps, taking them two at a time and flinging his coat and scarf onto a lone chair.

Arthur sits up straight, interest piquing. “You want to take it already?” He asks, trying not to let the growing sense of schadenfreude escape through his voice.

Part of him has been waiting for this, with a kind of slowly rising hunger that he hadn’t fully realised until now had been keeping him on edge: waiting for the moment, the line, the soliloquy that will be a step too far for Tommy Shelby’s apparently boundless ability. That which will force the rest of the company to see him properly, as Arthur does, see through this maddening infatuation they’re all inexplicably harbouring for him. See his weaknesses, the loud and blatant flaws in his performances. So maybe he could understand -- if he forced himself -- what they saw in his self-indulgent, sanguinary Macbeth, but Tommy can’t carry ‘To be’. He couldn’t possibly understand it, comprehend it to its full degree.

“You heard what I said,” Dom says, flicking open his script. “Tommy, ready whenever you are.”

The man in question picks himself up off the seat - and it really does look like that. Like he’s a ragdoll, who, with effortless grace and nonchalance, ambles to the stage, script hanging idly in his hand. This isn’t the poise of a man about to embark on the physical and mental toil Hamlet endures. This is a man who’s about to royally fuck up, and Arthur has a front row seat.

Tommy takes his place at centre stage and squares his shoulders, tipping his head back and bathing himself in the stage lights. His right hand, script free, rests against his chest, over the dog tags. His lips move silently in the pale light, and then he bows his head forward once more.

_“To be, or not to be -- that is the question.”_

It’s… it’s soft. It takes Arthur by complete shock because this is life or death. As much as he was expecting Tommy to go wrong, he wasn’t expecting it to be like this. Hamlet should be angry, frustrated and _resentful_ that he’s been put in this position, that these thoughts plague his mind, that he has this burden to bear. It’s not soft and quiet and accepting. It’s said in askance; casual to the point of disregard.

Tommy’s eyes flick down to the page and Arthur doesn’t even bother to hide his scoff -- he’s the lead and he hasn’t even bothered to learn the main soliloquy? He’s a Shakespearean actor -- allegedly -- and he has to check the second line of To be. What kind of Am-Dram group does he think this is?

_“Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or-”_

He stops, faltering and clenches his eyes, hand outreached.

  
_“-or to take arms against a sea of troubles,_  
_And by opposing end them. To die- to sleep-_  
_No more; and by a sleep to say we end_  
_The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks_  
_That flesh is heir to.”_

His rhythm has picked up, and the words begin to fly out of his mouth in a dizzying frenzy. When Arthur had wanted anger this isn’t what he meant either. It needs form, controlled rage and princely manner.

“ _'Tis a_ consummation.”

That stops him, as he trips over the word and dresses it up as a stress. Chest heaving, he drops his head for just a minute, hiding what Arthur doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know.  
  
_“Devoutly to be wish'd. To die- to sleep._  
_To sleep- perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!_  
_For in that sleep of death what dreams may come_  
_When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,_  
_Must give us pause. There's the respect_  
_That makes calamity of so long life._  
_For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,_  
_Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,_  
_The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,_  
_The insolence of office, and the spurns_  
_That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,_  
_When he himself might his quietus make_  
_With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,_  
_To grunt and sweat under a weary life,_  
_But that the dread of something after death-”_

He’s gone completely off the rails, rushing forth with no oppose, no thought, no restraint. Tommy goes on, beating out the words, punctuating each one with his fist hitting off his collarbone, keeping him in time with his heartbeat but it’s-- it’s uncontrolled, unchecked. It’s total descension into utter sorrow, into the epitome of the human struggle. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Not from his mouth. He’s not supposed to get it like this. Rage bubbles beneath Arthur’s skin as he looks to Dom, who’s watching, open mouthed, as Tommy goes on and on and on.

And then, it stops being Tommy. Though the face is undeniably Tommy’s, along with the stupid haircut and the damn dog tags, it shifts and it... it _becomes_.

 _“The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn_  
_No traveller returns- puzzles the will,_  
_And makes us rather bear those ills we have_  
_Than fly to others that we know not of?”_

The actor on the stage, the man who used to be Tommy and is morphing into a totally disillusioned Hamlet, his face twists into sorrow as he asks them, as he reaches out and pleads with them to give him an answer.

Something squeezes in Arthur’s chest, something that makes him want to explode into a burst of rage as much as it makes him want to break down and sob. He’s never, ever heard Hamlet like this. It’s not meant to be heard like this. But no matter how hard the pedant in Arthur shouts and screams and tries to rail against it, it feels undeniably right.

_“Thus conscience does make cowards-”_

The voice breaks, catching on a swallowed cry, slowing the roll of the words as he stumbles, and lets the weight of them hang heavy.

_“-cowards of us all,”_

For a moment he stalls, for just long enough that Arthur begins to wonder whether he won’t start up again at all. He wants to glance at Dom, gauge his reaction, but he doesn’t trust Tommy not to do something drastic the second he takes his eyes from him. Tommy, whose thousand yard gaze is fixed now heavenwards, who is somehow simultaneously both so much Hamlet and so much himself it seems a wonder his body can contain it all. He speaks as if the words are his own, as if they’re coming to him sudden and new, yet age-old and heavy still. Like a question he’s been asking himself his whole life, now rephrased.

Tommy blinks, shudders slightly, throat moving for a second as if he might choke. Then he continues, faster now, trying to catch up with himself.

 _“--And thus the native hue of resolution_  
_Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,_  
_And enterprises of great pith and moment_  
_With this regard their currents turn awry_  
_And lose the name of action.”_

The last word throws a heavy punch as it lands in heady silence, thick with tension and shock. The air feels heavy. No one is saying anything; there isn’t an eye in the room not fixed on Tommy who, as they watch, drops to his knees. The sound of it reverberates through the room, and leaves in its wake nothing but his uneven breaths.

Even from a few seats along it’s so quiet Arthur can’t miss Eames’ sharp inhale. It snatches his attention and Arthur looks at him a split second before the row creaks as he stands in a rush. He’s halfway towards the stage before Arthur knows it; Dom starts to call something, but Eames’ focus is singular. Dom might as well be invisible. They all might. All except Tommy.

“Tom,” Arthur hears him say, soft enough that he knows it’s intended only for him but the auditorium is still so silent it carries. “Tommy--”

He leaves before he can catch the rest, and he doesn’t look back as he goes.

 

* * *

 

 

Eames’ hand is wrapped tight around Tommy’s waist, holding him close and anchoring him as his head rests against the hollow between Eames’ neck and shoulder. It would be sweet, and Eames might’ve even been giddy with it if it had been two weeks before when they tentatively set out on this romantic endeavour, if Tommy’s eyes weren’t so dull, if his mouth wasn’t so slack, if he wasn’t so quiet.

“Alright?” Eames whispers against Tommy’s temple, using his left hand (his not filled with Tommy hand) to root around his pocket in search of his apartment keys. Tommy nods, once, woodenly, but a nod all the same.

No more words pass between them as Eames unlocks the door and leads them inside, slinging his kit bag against the door and throwing the keys in by the side table. Tommy detaches himself from Eames’ side, using his hand to pry off his vice-like grip, but at least it brings the shadow of a smile to his face, and at least he holds onto Eames’ hand nonetheless, turning to face him. He leans back on his feet, left arm thrown back and right connected to Eames’, and pulls, as if seeing how elastic they are, how tethered they might be. It gets a grin out of him, the bare bones of a chuckle, before he drops Eames’ hand and stretches up on his toes, not like a cat after a nap.

“Do you want tea?” Eames asks, knowing Tommy won’t want to talk about it yet.

“Please.”

Eames sets about the kitchen, filling the kettle and getting out two mugs along with the horrific Barry’s tea Tommy can’t live without and Earl Grey for himself. He doesn’t turn to watch as Tommy slips silently from the room, doesn’t deign to follow because Tommy Shelby isn’t followed unless he wants to be. And it takes no stretch of the imagination to presume that he might savour a few minutes of solitude, a chance to decompress.

Eames’ apartment is, frankly, a shithole, but it’s a Brooklyn shithole so they just call it “bohemian” instead. It’s right in the middle of Boerum Hill, beside a most definitely not totally legal Chinese restaurant and a bar (totally legal, can’t pull a pint for shite). But it’s worth it for the view. The not totally urban view, where just beyond the horizon of roofs and buildings the sun is setting on the Hudson and cars and people still rush by him but in a much less frantic way than in Downtown.

The sky is a dusty grey and Eames watches dust particles dance in the sun rays, as Tommy picks up the phone in the other room.

It’s hard to hear over the kettle boiling, and Eames doesn’t necessarily want to, but he can’t help the way his heart clenches when Tommy breathes out “ _Pol_.”

He sighs. “I’m fine, yeah. I’m fine. How’re you? And all the boys?” Eames can practically hear some of the tension seep from Tommy as hums and comments in all the right places in the frivolous, meaningless flow of Pol’s tirade.

And then it stops.

“I’m fine. I wasn’t lying.”

The kettle begins to rattle, growing louder.

“I know I said that last time, but I mean it Pol, really.”

Outside, a man gets out of a yellow taxi cab and is greeted by his girlfriend, or at least so Eames assumes by the way she throws her arms around his neck and presses her lips to his in a brazen display of love.

“Well it’s never going to be very _bloody_ easy to play a suicidal, paranoia ridden prince, is it?” He snaps, suddenly. Vicious. “No, no-- I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry, Pol. You don’t need to worry though, I-- it’s not getting bad again. Really.”

A gaggle of girls, drunk on life and high on the euphoria of a young night stumble into a car, teetering in their high heels and laughing, giddy on each other’s company on the possibilities the evening presents.

“It’s… I’m not alone anymore.” Silence. “Yes. Him.”

The kettle whistles, boiled and bubbling.

Tommy’s voice drops three octaves, and Eames has to strain to hear him through the plaster walls. “He’s good to me, Pol. He makes it… He makes it easier to come home. To let go of the character.”

Eames stirs milk into Tommy’s tea, puts two spoonfuls of sugar in his owns and waits, braced against the counter, letting out a shaky breath.

“Yes. I will. Okay. Bye-- I’ll see you soon. Bye, Pol.” Eames stays where stands, in utter silence, trying to gauge Tommy’s mood from here, from the pattern of his breathing. But he doesn’t need to, in the end, when Tommy calls out, “You can come in now.”

Exhaling through his nose, Eames picks up the two mugs and pads into the laughable excuse of a sitting room he has, before setting them down on the coffee table, and looking up.

Tommy’s knuckles are white around his phone, his eyes are wide and just barely red-rimmed. When their bright blue irises flick up to meet Eames’ own stare, it’s all he can do not to melt right there beneath that icy stare.

“It’s rude to eavesdrop,” is what Tommy eventually says, voice devoid of the previous emotion he’d carried as Hamlet.

“You know how thin the walls are,” Eames replies, candid, because he can hardly reject that.

“Yes.” It’s a simple answer, unnervingly so, especially when Tommy can bullshit with the best of them, and it probably means more than he’s willing to let on, but Eames isn’t going to push him on it.

Tommy places the phone on the table, before falling back into the couch and letting out a breath, harsh and jagged, like he hadn’t realised he was holding it. But he’s open and pliant, in a way he only seems to be around Eames, so it’s a gamble -- but not a big one -- when he reaches out to touch.

He places his hand on the back of Tommy’s neck, and the tired man relaxes into it, eyes fluttering shut. Rubbing a thumb against his pulse point, Eames opens his mouth to speak.

“You did well today.”

Tommy snorts quietly, and Eames scoots closer, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. “Really,” he murmurs against the warm skin. “You were… You got lost in it, but you came back. You came back to us.”

There’s a weight behind the gaze Tommy levels at Eames, as he reaches out to stroke a thumb over the curve of his cheek. “I have a feeling,” he says slowly, not rushing the words, as if he’s nervous they might run away from him. “That coming back to you has become an inevitable part of my existence.”

It’s Tommy that breaks the gaze, Tommy that looks away and turns his head to the window and the cityscape the sprawls before them, and it’s Tommy that opens his mouth to speak again.

“I miss Iraq, sometimes,” he begins. “Which is fucking stupid, because I couldn’t wait to leave when I was there. But I miss the heat, I miss the routine, I miss…” He laughs, dry and brittle. “I miss the dirt.” Tommy shakes his head, as if he can’t quite believe himself. “And I miss feeling like I was part of something. Something bigger than me. A machine. And now I’m--” His voice breaks over the lump that forms in his throat, mouth being tugged downwards. “Now I’m on that fucking stage, and it’s just me, and I’m saying all these words but-- but they’re mine, Eames. They’re like velvet on my lips. I can’t-- They’re my words. They’re _my_ words. I felt that and I need--” Beneath Eames’ touch, his chest heaves with an unopened cry.

“The first time I ever read Hamlet I was in Bagram,” Tommy whispers. “Found it wedged between a bible and a Playboy. I didn’t understand half of it, but then I read that. To be or not to be. You don’t understand what it meant-- in the middle of fucking nowhere, that I found something that told me I wasn’t by myself, for once. This-- this dead weight in my heart, it had been felt before.” He captures his bottom lip beneath teeth, worrying it, biting it raw.

“I took it with me, in the pocket of my trousers. A few hours later, I got shot in the back during a routine mission. And now I’m back here, saying those same words but I’m not the same. I’m me-- but it’s different and those fucking words still mean as much as they always did.” He hums thoughtfully, his features clearing momentarily as he stares down at their intertwined hands. “ _To be or not to be._ ”

“Tom,” Eames mutters, pressing a kiss to his neck, before leaning up and peppering his jaw with them. His heart is breaking under the weight of his love for this man, this perfect, broken man.

“I never used to be afraid to die, you know,” he says lazily, stretching out beneath Eames and exposing his neck for better access, sighing happily when Eames obliges him. “And now I’ve met you, and I’ve suddenly become startlingly aware of my own mortality.”

Eames looks up at him, and with an outstretched hand, rubs a thumb over Tommy’s red and swollen lips. _“And thus, with a kiss, I die.”_

 

* * *

 

 

Technical week creeps up on them in the usual descending rush, with little consideration for Arthur’s nerves. He rushes into the theatre, flustered and windswept, and bypasses Dom arguing with Yusuf about the lighting, making a beeline for the stage.

Clustered on the platform are the main corps, idly flickering through their words and half-heartedly going through lines.

“Is there a particular reason you’re all standing there gnomeless?” He asks, trying not to let his breathlessness show.

“We’re running through the blocking of the the opening scene in Act 2,” Ariadne retorts, looking more concerned with her split-ends than the script in front of her.

“You’ve done that to death,” Arthur grouses. “We have one week until opening and most of you don’t even know your directions for Act 3.”

“We could take the play,” Tommy suggests, voice lax and lazy, tossing the skull that is Yorick from hand to hand.

From where he’s lying on the floor, script over his face as if he were going for a catnap, Eames quips, “This is the play, darling.”

To Arthur’s horror, Tommy grins at that, melting like ice cream in a fucking microwave, like some kind of schoolkid with a crush. “I meant with the player king and queen.”

“Mmmm,” Eames hums. “Could be worth our while.”

“You know, when you think about it, that whole--” Ariadne makes a wishy-washy gesture with her hand, lights catching off her bracelets. “Play that Hamlet puts on must have been pretty meta for Shakespeare’s day. It’s kind of taken for granted now, but are we ever going to have someone of the same calibre to change the tides of theatre again?”

“A play within a play… Like a dream within a dream,” Eames muses, still on the floor.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Arthur snaps. “And for God’s sake, get off the floor. Have a sense of propriety.” Before he can continue, Dom interrupts.

“New plan,” he yells from the back seats of the theatre. “Tommy, we’re taking To be again.”

As the lights begin to dim and the rest of the actors scatter off the stage, Arthur catches Eames’ fingers brush Tommy’s hand, doesn’t miss the way Tommy’s face pales and his eyes flutter shut, like the apprehension you feel before the impact of something that you know is going to hurt.

Tommy is left alone on stage as everyone around him retreats, abandoned in the spotlight as darkness descends upon him. He takes two moments, and Arthur hears him exhale once, just barely controlled, before clearing his throat and tipping his head up.

 _“To be, or not to be--_  
_That is the question._  
_Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer-”_

Tommy stops, suddenly, faltering, the words spilling out of his mouth, unravelled and broken. “I-- sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Dom is saying, and Arthur tries not to bristle at the gentleness in his voice. “Take your time.”

Tommy shakes his head, shutting his eyes. His jaw is clenched tight; Arthur can see the shadows appear and dissipate as he relaxes it. Snakes roil in Arthur’s stomach as he watches Tommy try to regain his composure, and the uncharacteristic flare of sympathy is quickly overtaken by the simmering of anger just beneath his skin. Anger at Dom for picking this absolute liability to lead their show, anger at Tommy for putting himself in that position, anger at himself for letting it happen in the first place.

 _“To be or not to be,”_ Tommy begins again. _“That is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer-- Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer… Nobler to suffer….”_

Arthur’s seen this before, seen it in Mal, seen it in other, less prepared actors who let the weight of it get too much and in Tommy’s eyes

in his eyes

his eyes

there’s the weight of the world, straining to see past the words that consume him. It’s an undoing that Arthur’s terrified to see the end of.

“Stop!” Someone snaps. Eames. “Stop. Dom, stop this.”  
  
Dom, rolling his eyes, throws up his hands. “Eames, let him--”

“You don’t get to do this to people!” Eames roars back.

Arthur’s about to interject, but before he can put out the evergrowing fire between Dom and Eames he goes to turn to Tommy, to make sure he doesn’t move a muscle, only to find the man has vanished from the stage. There must be something in his face that shows his complete lack of ability to deal with this shit, because Ariadne, quietly, tells him, “I think he went to his dressing room,” from her place offstage.

Leaving Dom and Eames’ bickering behind, Arthur storms off to the right wing of the theatre in long, powerful strides to find Tommy, ignoring Ariadne’s Arthur, don’t--.  
He makes his way down the cramped, narrow corridors, overflowing tech kit and props and when he eventually comes to Tommy’s room, with little time for thought he swings the door open, and then promptly tries not to be taken aback by what he sees.

Tommy, leaning against the makeup table, has his dog tags pressed tight against his lips, like a rosary, and he’s whispering something fiercely, clinging onto the words with a desperation seen in dying men praying their last Hail Mary. After the initial shock wears off, Arthur’s ears tune in, and his stomach drops when he recognises the words.

_Thus conscience does make cowards of us all._

It’s 'To be'. He’s reciting 'To be'.

Tommy catches him, out of the corner of his eye, and slowly looks up at him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Arthur reckons this is how Hamlet must have felt when his father appeared to him in a ghostly vision. Dead eyes, swallow skin, unrelenting thousand yard stare. Slowly, Tommy begins to speak. “Do you know what my commanding officer said to me before I went out? Before I knew I’d be nearly dead in an hour?”

He turns away from Arthur, refocusing on the metal tags in his hand. “Death smiles on all of us,” Tommy recites, numbly. “We may as well smile back.” His icy blue eyes look back up at Arthur. “I know you don’t think I can carry this. But I’ll promise you now, Arthur, I have been closer with death than most men ever are. More than most men should be.”

“I know,” Arthur says, quiet, in a rare moment of genuine, human kindness.

“I’m not going to break onstage,” Tommy says, firmer this time, standing more upright. “Eames just lets his sensibilities get the better of him.”

“He does.” The words feel awkward in his mouth but it’s not like Arthur can disagree with Tommy; he’d seen it for himself just a few minutes beforehand. “You, um… You can just take five. I’ll deal with Dom and Eames.”

Tommy nods, but doesn’t answer other than that; his eyes are fixed to the wall in front of him, miles away in a place of heavy and painful memories that he carries in scars and soliloquies.

 

* * *

 

 

Arthur walks out to the sound of commotion.

“You’re being completely reckless--”

“ _I’m_ being reckless? You’re the one that stopped a rehearsal in the middle of tech week for no good reason.”

Dom and Eames stand alarmingly close to each other, poised forward, and Eames’ muscular arms are tense and ready with tension.

“No good reason? How can you be so blind?” Eames swings round, flinging his arm out. “Arthur, tell him, will you?”

Bone tired, weary, and not really in the mood to play mediator, Arthur asks, “Tell him what?”

“That I’m not going to let what happened to Mal happen to Tommy.”

Arthur sighs, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “For Christ’s sake, I thought we went over this with Ariadne. Mal was already sick. She was predisposed—”

Now Eames’ anger is directed at him, sharpened like the point of a knife. “And Tommy isn’t? He’s been through trauma—”

“I can’t believe you have the audacity to even compare them,” Dom cuts in, and now he’s angry. “Mal is dead. My _wife_ is _dead_. The _mother of my children_ is dead. You do not get to use her to make a _fucking_ point.”

“You don’t get to use Tommy to get back into theatre’s good graces,” Eames hisses. “You don’t think everyone sees through that? You push and push and push your actors and at first it’s commendable, it’s all ‘dedication to the arts’, and then someone fucking _dies_ and now you’re trying to make up for it--”

“Hey--” Arthur cuts in, but Eames completely ignores him, steamrolling on.

“When are you going to get it? You can’t redeem yourself by repeating history. This isn’t going to bring Mal back. Tommy isn’t a vessel for you.”

“Okay, listen to me,” Dom says, deadly quiet, and it sends ice through Arthur’s veins because that’s Dom’s tell for absolute rage, freezing and hardening instead of bubbling over like most are prone to. “You need to be very fucking careful what you say to me next. I don’t give a shit about this little crusade of yours -- if you have a problem, take it up with the fucking union. But as of now, I’m still your director and you’re just an actor. Now I understand your professional concerns, and I promise you, that despite what you might think, I don’t want to walk Tommy to his grave--”

“He’s got a point though, Dom,” Arthur says quietly.

Dom hurls to face him, eyes widening in disbelief and betrayal. “Arthur, you-- you of all people should know that I’m not--”

“It’s not that, it’s--” Arthur swallows, uneasy. “Dom, you knew he was a flight risk before you cast him. We had this same fight before Macbeth, and okay, we got away with it, but it’s clearly not the same now. If he has to break himself like this to get the performance, is it even worth it?”

“I can do it.”

A voice from the darkness, strong and sterling, and like a spectre, Tommy emerges from the shadows.

In an impossibly soft way that nearly breaks Arthur, Eames says “Tom--”

“I appreciate the concern, but I know what I can do, what I’m capable of. This isn’t going to get the best of me, I promise.”

Dom, to his credit, does seem hesitant. “If you’re sure?”

“Positive,” Tommy affirms. “I want to run through it again. And then the opening for scene three...” his voice trails off as he walks towards the stage, with Dom following, and Arthur and Eames left behind, shrouded in darkness.

 

* * *

 

 

**END OF ACT TWO**


	3. ACT THREE

**ACT THREE**

**IN WHICH ARTHUR PUNCHES EAMES, LOSES ALL SEMBLANCE OF CONTROL, AND SOMEHOW MAKES IT OUT ALRIGHT**

 

* * *

 

 

At the end of what was, between minor breakdowns and potentially career-ending arguments, quite a tumultuous rehearsal, Arthur finds Eames in a quiet hallway as the others empty out for the night.

He reaches forward to touch, an uncharacteristic indulgence, but no sooner have his fingers circled around Eames’ wrist than Eames is tense, and he breaks the grip.

“I, ah, can’t,” he says, looking away from Arthur’s heated gaze.

“What? Why not?” Arthur’s stomach falls to his feet. As if Eames is choosing now to have a modicum of professionalism.

“I’ve... I’ve met someone, Arthur.”

“Well, you’re always meeting people.” And that’s true, and it’s never stopped them before. He reaches out for Eames again, but he pushes him away.

“No, Arthur, this is... Tom is different.” He gives Arthur a sorry smile. “Sorry.”

“What, you two are serious? Official?” Arthur feels sick, like the girl who’s just gotten dumped at her prom. “Do you love him? Are you… are you in love with him?”

“Well, we haven’t tackled that particular conversation quiet yet, but… yes, I think so.” Eames says, and Arthur loathes the gentleness of his voice, the pity in it, the attempt at rueful humour as if to soften the blow.

“I'm with Tommy.” He wants to tell him he doesn't care, wants to demand, petulantly, that Eames explain why he's saying this at all, it isn't his life, it doesn't matter to him. Let him ruin himself with this bloodstained ghost of a man if he wants it so badly. “For better or for worse.”

“It's going to be for worse,” he spits, before he can think better of it.

Eames smiles, slowly. This slightly sad, patient smile, as if he understands. If he didn't have the self control that he does, it would make Arthur want to scream. “I knew that,” he says, “from the moment I met him.” He fidgets with the strap of his bag. “Goodnight, Arthur.”

As Eames walks away, Arthur has to reach for his totem to make sure this isn’t a dream, because he could swear he feels the earth start to cave beneath him.

 

* * *

 

 

After a few obligatory moments of sheer confusion and, despite how much he tries to kid himself otherwise, heartbreak, Arthur pushes himself off the wall he was leaning on and walks away, towards the exit.

He’s stopped, halfway through, by a gentle Hey, and when he turns around Ariadne is smiling at him timidly.

“What are you doing here?” He blurts out.

“I was getting my stuff,” she explains. “And then I saw…”

Arthur waves it off. “It wasn’t-- it was a casual thing. It never meant anything.”

“Are you sure?”

Since he met her, Arthur’s had something of a love-hate relationship with the way Ariadne always, unfailingly speaks her mind. She isn’t callous or inconsiderate, but she doesn’t stand for bullshit, either. She’ll gentle her tone and take care with her words when she deems it necessary, but doesn’t play coy, never sugarcoats. It makes conversations like this difficult; there’s nowhere to hide, from her.

He’s been staring her down for just a beat too long for his yes to be convincing. He says it anyway. And again: “Yes, of course. It was nothing. Eames and I? You know me better than that, don’t you?”

“Actually, Arthur,” There’s that gentleness, the same as was in Eames’ rejection, that pity. As if he’s been bereaved. She puts her head to the side slightly. “I wonder sometimes whether I really know you at all.”

That takes him aback. He stares at her, mouth open, indignant. “Ariadne, what on Earth are you--”

“Just because it didn’t mean anything doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to lose it, though, right?” she cuts in, looking him dead in the eyes.

To look away would be to back down, admit she’s right, so Arthur holds her gaze even though it burns. “This is nothing to do with you.”

“Of course it is, Arthur, I’m--”

  
“Part of this production too, I know. But I can promise you now that whatever my personal relationship with Eames may be, it isn’t going to affect my professional performance or my ability to do my job.”

“Oh my god, Arthur, not because of that. Because I’m your friend.”

He laughs. Ariadne does not.

He blinks. “What?”

“I’m your friend. You can talk to me.”

“I already told you. There’s nothing to talk about. Unless you feel like making sure Eames and Tommy can remain professional--”

“Arthur,” she interrupts him again. “What are you so afraid of?”

The question comes out of nowhere. Arthur balks. “What?”

“What do you think is going to happen if you talk to me about this? What bad could possibly come from letting someone see through this exterior of yours for once in your life? I’m not going to try to force you. God knows I couldn’t if I wanted to. But you’re wound so tight you look like you’re going to explode any second. For your own sake, Arthur, not the play’s, not the company’s. Just talk. You never know.” She smiles, maddeningly patient and understanding. “It might help.”

“I--” Arthur opens his mouth, closes it again. He feels caught out, undefended. Exposed. He hates her for seeing through him so easily. For seeing something in him he couldn’t even see himself. “--I need a drink.”

Ariadne nods sagely. “I know a place.”

 

* * *

 

Drinking with the express purpose of lowering his inhibitions goes against every principle, instinct, and natural inclination that Arthur possesses. When tipsiness begins to creep in around his third drink he has to force himself to finish it, rather than following his usual routine of downing two glasses of water and stepping out into the cold air to clear his head.

Ariadne watches him with an intimidating blend of concern and fascination, slowly sipping her first and only beer. Barely a word has passed between them in the twenty minutes since they sat down; Arthur has no desire to open his mouth except to put alcohol into it, and Ariadne has never been much of one for meaningless small talk. So they sit, in near silence, and wait.

Half way through his fourth drink Arthur gets up to go to the bathroom and realises, with a dim sense of achievement but mostly just dread, that he’s drunk.

“Okay,” he says, when he makes it back to Ariadne.

“Okay?” She looks him over, slowly, and he tries not to lift his chin, stare her down, the way he usually would under scrutiny.

“I… Eames and… and I…”

Ariadne is patient and calm as she watches him, but Arthur doesn’t know how to do this. Even somewhat inebriated, he has no idea how to begin.

“We… it wasn’t serious. It really wasn’t. I didn’t want it to-- I don’t want-- I’m not interested in-- a relationship.” His voice falters on the word, and he loathes himself for it.

“But you care about him,” Ariadne says. She says it like what it is: a fact. No assumption or accusation or judgement. And no pity. Nothing for Arthur to rail against.

He swallows, mouth dry all of a sudden. “Yes.”

“Are you in love with him?”

His heart lurches. He reaches for his glass -- it’s empty, but he grips it anyway, hoping the cold of it in contrast to the close heat of the room might be grounding. It isn’t. “He’s in love with Tommy Shelby,” he says, slowly.

Ariadne purses her mouth. “That’s not the question I asked. Are you--”

“Does it even make a difference?” Arthur tries to snap back, but it comes out sounding more like a plea. He grits his teeth, grips the glass. It’s too hot in the bar, too loud, the air too thick. His hands are shaking.

“Of course it does,” Ariadne says. She sounds upset, which bothers him -- what does she have to be upset about? Nobody has just broken her heart. Nobody has just forced her to accept she has even one at all. Gently, she touches the back of his knuckles. He jerks away, puts his hand over his face, puts his elbow on the table and lets his head rest heavy in his palm. “Arthur.”

“Yes.” The word doesn’t feel like his own. He’s not even certain he says it out loud. His chest is tight, head spinning. The rush of his pulse in his head is almost enough to drown out the sounds of the bar. “Yes.” He can’t breathe. “I love him.”

 

* * *

 

 

Arthur stumbles out of the taxi into which Ariadne had shoved him, the New York summer breeze hitting his face and cooling against his skin.

As if moving through molasses, he makes his way up the stairs, still fuzzy at the edges from the Jack Daniels and a tequila shot he’s going to live to regret in the morning. With shaky hands, he puts the keys in the lock and twists, and has to brace himself against the doorframe. He hasn’t been this drunk in years, and it almost makes him laugh. And then he looks up at the empty apartment, dark and pristine clean, and it almost makes him cry.

He shuts the door behind him, doesn’t bother to hit the lights as the moonlight and neon from outside filtering into the room are enough to puncture the darkness. Slumping on his sitting room couch, facing the bookshelf, Arthur loosens his tie, railing against the remnants of years worth of tears left unshed lodged in his throat. That anger that had simmered beneath his skin for so long, shifted, twisted and morphed back into its original being; a deep, desperate sadness, born of an all consuming passion that consumed him every waking moment. A desire of want, of the necessity of an aspiration, to do more, be more, live more.

But Arthur had never understood how to do that. Not properly. There was always some part of him that could never fully allow himself to give, a part that refused to fully grasp the strains of life. He was too in his head, always. The spectator, never the participant. The audience, never the actor. The critic, never the creator.

Still, though, he remembers. Vividly remembers the first time in his life he felt not alone. Nine years old and left by himself in the house, the babysitter gossiping on the phone and paying him little mind, sneaking into his parents’ library and with an awed hesitation, picking a book at random.

The very same copy he has in his own bookshelf, cracked and almost torn to pieces in comparison to the others, much more immaculate, but this one is spilling over with a live loved.

William Shakespeare’s _The Tempest._

He can recall how fast he’d ran out of the room with it, clutched tight in his little hands, up two flights of stairs to the attic because he was nervous he’d be caught out reading a ‘grown up’ book. How he’d sat, knees curled into his chest as he engrossed himself into the words, threw himself into the storm. Most of it went entirely over his head, but there were flecks of an understanding that even a nine year old could grasp, something that transcended age and education. Prospero’s speech, Arthur could recite by heart at ten. An anthem for him, belted out like a hail mary.

_Our revels now are ended. These our actors,_  
_As I foretold you, were all spirits, and_  
_Are melted into air, into thin air:_  
_And like the baseless fabric of this vision,_  
_The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,_  
_The solemn temples, the great globe itself,_  
_Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,_  
_And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,_  
_Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff_  
_As dreams are made on; and our little life_  
_Is rounded with a sleep._

The wonder, the fascination that accompanied it all, the dream-like quality that was sown through every word; the strength, the triumph, the ephemeral nature of the message that lay at its core. We’re a dream. A god dream, an artist’s dream, life is as beautiful and meaningless as we make it.

Maybe that’s what had terrified him for so long. The idea that his one life was being wasted on a distant, unending dream that he could never hope to reach.

But with the fluorescent New York light illuminating the dark sanctuary he hides himself away in, Arthur disagrees with himself, as he goes over and picks up his beaten and battered copy, thumbing through the pages and smiling, despite it all. Despite the pain and the rumination. Smiling.

Nothing is permanent. Eames, Hamlet, Tommy, Aridane, Dom, Arthur. All wisps. All dust. That’s the point, Arthur realises. That’s the point.

His father had inscribed on the corner of the introductory page: _The immortal worth of art is created by mortal man. The author is mortal but embodies or gives expressive qualities to man’s soul, and in doing so, man becomes immortal._

Arthur is not a permanent fixture in this universe. Neither is anyone else. But art, classics, Shakespeare, they will live on. And so, in a way, people live on with them. Shakespeare isn’t famous because he wrote good stuff. Shakespeare is famous because Shakespeare was able to whittle down the complexities of men’s souls and make them into art. Shakespeare took pain and made it into something beautiful.

Arthur flips through the rest of the pages, and lets out a surprised laugh at the page he lands on. Where nine year old pencil meets twelve year old highlighter and so on and so forth. He stares at the passage and he’s reminded of the power of words. Their ability to build and destroy, to make you feel strong while you might not necessarily need it. To reach out and touch, to save, when we need it most.

_“Awake, dear heart, awake! Thou hast slept well. Awake!”_

There’s wet drops of something running down his face -- tears, Arthur registers, too late -- but there’s a smile on his face, as he remembers. And remembers. And remembers.

Remembers Coriolanus and Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and discussions with his father and hugs from his mother and hot summer days and cold winter nights and the way the pages of plays and books would dry up in the midday heat, college and meeting Mal and then Dom and their wedding and seeing Phillipa and James for the first time and crying at both, how he’d felt at his first show and being told by a casting director that he tapped into anger too easily and then his first production and how intriguing and satisfying that had been, all the sad moments and happy moments that occured in between and somewhere in it all, Eames. Eames and heartbreak and isolation and the crushing realisation of his own solitude, all of that past him, and now, the life he’s lived, the life he’s yet to live, stretching out before him and letting go. Letting go of it all. Allowing himself to feel, wholeheartedly and without reservation.

And at the backbone of it all: words, and Shakespeare, and a twenty-two year old copy of _The Tempest_.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s panic stations in the theatre wings, their last full rehearsal before opening night. But it’s a familiar, comfortable kind of panic, because it always happens at the start of a new production. It would be disturbing if it didn’t. Even Arthur, with his standards, concedes that rehearsals exist for mistakes to be made, ironed out, and is troubled by performances that are too perfect too early on. Similarly, these last few hours here are for panicking. And though he slips into panic mode well enough, he can’t help but mourn the loss of the peace he’d found a few nights ago, swept away in a sea of frenzied last-minute changes and highly-strung crew members.

Dom panics in a slow-burning, concentrated kind of way; it manifests in pacing, harsh words, and a layer of sweat under his shirt collar.

“You should be in costume already,” he snaps at Ariadne, who’s quietly running some last minute lines with Polonius.

“It takes less than two minutes, Dom,” she says, without looking up, and reverts straight back to Ophelia in her next breath. She doesn’t seem to panic much, at least not under this kind of stress, or if she does it manifests quietly. A sharper tone of voice and a habit of touching and twisting her hair, biting her nails, that’s as much as Arthur has noticed.

Eames acts like he doesn’t panic, but the way he amps up his swagger and can’t get through a sentence without some stupid quip -- more so than usual -- the way he goes quiet and sets his jaw hard, eyes a little too wide when he thinks nobody’s looking, those are his tells.

Arthur notices everyone’s, knows them all, knows how to read each and every one of them like a script, and nobody knows his, and he likes it that way.

Except Tommy Shelby. Tommy, who is new and mercurial and maddening, equally as prone to snide remarks and scowling as he is to brutal honesty and thousand yard stares. He’s robbed Arthur of his ability to learn him, catalogue him, predict him. His only persistent traits seem to be a bad temper and a taste for melodrama.

 

* * *

 

 

Tommy Shelby is absent without leave, and Arthur is counting down the syllables before he can officially tell Dom I told you so. He’s torn, though, between this cruel smugness, and anger, and straight up concern, because it’s too late now for anything to be done about it and Arthur doesn’t have all that much stock in his understudy, either. Not that he blames him, having to understudy for Tommy, but still. If the man could’ve just started missing his cues a month ago, when there was still time to replace him. But of course he had to wait till the day before. Just to fuck everyone over one more time.

Polonius is nearing the end of his speech, after which Tommy will only have two lines from Claudius and about thirty seconds of set rearrangement before he’s due to open the next scene.

“He should be here,” Arthur says to Dom, who shoots him a look over his notes which is a mildly threatening combination of haggard and pissed off.

“I know,” he grits out.

“So should Eames.”

“I know.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow and pushes himself off the wall he’s been leaning on. “I’ll go and find them, shall I?”

“Fine.” He doesn't bother to tell Dom how much of an ass he's being. Something about the stormy, far-off look in his eyes tells him it wouldn't go down too well. So he leaves him there, with his notes and his play and somewhere, in the far corner's of his mind, the ghost of Mal, ever-present and haunting.

 

* * *

 

 

His first port of call is the men’s dressing room, and he can hear them before he’s even reached the door; Tommy’s abrasive brogue rising for a moment before falling again, Eames’ low rumble too quiet to distinguish individual words at this distance, though the urgency of it is clear.

Arthur quiets his footsteps as he approaches the door, pauses just outside.

“It’s not true, Tom. He’s wrong about you. Completely wrong, you know he is. What makes you put his word above everyone else’s, anyway? Dom cast you. He wants you in this role. He’s the fucking director, not that jumped-up wanker. Tommy, would you look at me--”

“No. No, it’s the other way round. He’s right, Eames. He sees through me. I shouldn’t be here.”

He hears Eames’ slow exhale, the sound of fabric shifting. Imagines him cupping Tommy’s haughty cheekbones in his large rough hands. He’s reeling from what he’s just heard. Not having seen Tommy’s mouth form the words, Arthur almost refuses to believe he spoke them at all.

“And he knows it. I got ahead of myself, thinking I could do this justice, but I can’t. I shouldn’t be here.”

Arthur’s heart is beginning to thump uncomfortably quickly in his chest. Now? He’s coming to this conclusion _now_?

“You’re just saying this fucking now?” He absolutely is not the type to act on impulse, as a very strict rule, but occasionally it gets the better of even him, and the demand is out of his mouth almost before Arthur is through the door. There’s the skin-crawling sound of wood scraping wood as Eames and Tommy stand up sharply, turn in unison to look at him.

“Arthur--” Eames starts, tone somewhere between surprise and warning, but Arthur ignores him. He’s fixed on Tommy with single-minded fury.

“Opening night is _tomorrow_ , Shelby. You couldn’t have had this epiphany six weeks ago?”

Tommy has the decency to look taken aback, at least. No doubt he wasn’t expecting Arthur, or anyone, for that matter, to speak to him with such frankness. Arthur’s known from the start that he needs to be taken down a peg or three.

“You’re right that I’m right. But you’re too late. You’ve already ruined this production -- the least you can do now is get the fuck over yourself and see it through. Get back to the stage, right now. You’ve missed your cue.”

He turns to leave, still bristling with anger but having recovered enough self control, just barely, to be aware that he has nothing else to do with it, that the priority now is forcing Tommy back on stage whether either of them likes it or not. And Tommy, to his credit, has said nothing.

Eames, though. That relentless, loveblind bastard just can’t resist sharing his thoughts, as always, unasked for.

“No, Arthur, stop.” He strides up behind him, and Arthur pauses in the doorway, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Eames, we do not have time--”

“I don’t give a fuck. What in God’s name entitles you to speak to him like that?” Eames, Arthur realises, sounds almost as angry as he is; it’s there in his clipped vowels, the cultivated refinement slipping from his accent as his words quicken. Rapid and low, that’s how he speaks when he’s really angry. Like a gathering storm. “He has talent. He has skill. He has passion. He is more than capable of carrying this role. And as for you-- you don’t know a single bloody thing about him, you realise that? Nothing. You don’t know the life he’s lived. And even if you did, you couldn’t possibly even begin to understand--”

“Eames--” Tommy tries to interrupt him, and Arthur will come to realise later that it was probably because Tommy has years of experience of people in incredibly high stress situations, knows what it looks like when a man is about to snap, and recognised it on Arthur.

Because half a second later, Arthur hits Eames in his perfectly shaped mouth.

“Tommy, you’re late for your cue and-- What the _fuck_?”

Yusuf, the technician, has appeared in the doorway, coffee cup dangling from his hand, looking half asleep -- now steadily waking up.

The sudden interruption jolts Arthur back into himself and he becomes painfully aware of his stinging hand, bloodied knuckles. He can’t imagine what this must look like, to someone stepping in from the outside: a dishevelled and now pissed-off Tommy, an equally dishevelled and pissed-off Arthur, and between them Eames, cradling his jaw and bleeding from the mouth.

“I--” Arthur opens and closes his mouth as his heart starts to jackrabbit against his chest when met with Yusuf’s incredulous look. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“Well Jesus, Arthur, what does it look like?” Yusuf exclaims. “No, you know what-- I don’t want to know. I’m not getting paid enough for this.”

“Yusuf, why haven’t you-- Oh my _god_.”

Arthur winces at the sound of Ariadne’s voice. She looks dreadfully imposing, appearing in the doorway in full costume. Her face, already agitated, becomes thunderous, as she looks from Yusuf, to Arthur, to Eames’ split lip, to Tommy, and fills in the blanks. Her dress billows as she whirls to face Yusuf and all but jabs him in the chest with an angry, urgent gesture. “Get Dom here. Now.”

Yusuf looks relieved for the excuse to go. Fleetingly, Arthur envies him.

“One of you want to tell me what in hell is going on?” Ariadne rounds on the rest of them again, eyes wide, teeth bared like a Fury. She looks almost more like Ophelia than she does on stage.

“That would be nice,” Eames mutters, slurring around the blood in his mouth. It was a mean punch; his lip is properly torn, bleeding steadily between the fingers he has pressed to the wound, dripping down his wrist.

“Arthur and Eames seem to have had a misunderstanding,” Tommy offers, in a tone so infuriatingly flat it’s impossible to tell whether he’s being facetious.

“Eames--” Ariadne looks at him, and her expression crumples rapidly from furious to exasperated. They don't have time for this. None of them has time for this. “Go clean up before you ruin that shirt.”

With an acquiescent grunt, Eames goes. Tommy follows, hard-eyed gaze sweeping the room as he does, like a guard dog whose training won’t let him attack, despite his instinct urging him to.

With the evidence of his outburst almost gone -- only his aching knuckles left as proof -- and under Ariadne’s angry, anxious gaze, Arthur feels himself begin to deflate. His adrenaline is draining from him, taking his spark of anger with it.

“What the hell were you thinking?” She demands of him, stepping closer. Behind the anger, worse than anything else, there’s pity as she reaches for his damaged hand. “Arthur, you can’t just--”

“Why did I just see Eames bleeding in the hall?”

Dom has appeared in the doorway, now. Arthur closes his eyes for a second, and tries to shake the feeling like he’s in some sort of sickly unfunny skit.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” Ariadne quotes, looking at him over her shoulder, weary.

Arthur watches Dom’s gaze go from her face to his raw knuckles. Watches comprehension dawn. Watches comprehension turn to outrage. He wants to sit down.

“You can’t be serious,” Dom says. “Arthur? You _hit_ him?”

“Looks that way,” Arthur exhales. It certainly feels that way, with a dull ache spreading through his fist, accented with sharp stabs of pain though his fingers.

“Sit down,” Dom orders, without an inch of room for argument. Not that Arthur would, anyway. He reaches behind him for the nearest chair and sinks into it without so much as a glance. “Nobody is leaving this room until this -- whatever this is -- is dealt with.”

Silence falls, suffocatingly heavy. Arthur closes his eyes again, puts his un-bruised hand over his face for a moment. He hears Dom drag over another chair, hears him exhale quietly as he sits. Feels the stress, confusion, frustration, radiating from him. For the first time it crosses Arthur’s mind to consider how this must feel, for him. To be a director watching his project disintegrate in front of him. He wonders if it’s similar to the steady cracking of his heart he felt with every ridiculous decision he watched Dom make -- casting Tommy, the implied romance, the twisting of the script, taking on Hamlet to begin with. Ridiculous decisions, but he stuck by them nonetheless, defended them with his every breath, made it work -- and here it is, falling apart because his crew couldn’t just check themselves at the door. Had to come stumbling in with all their own emotions, their baggage, their issues. This is why, this is why he’s always, always believed that actors should be no more than empty vessels for scripts to fill.

This is what happens when they forget their place.

“Arthur,” Dom says. Arthur raises his head. “Care to fill me in? What exactly is this? What’s going on here?”

He doesn’t know what to say.

“I know you and Eames butt heads sometimes, you fall out, I can deal with that. I can even understand wanting to smack that smug bastard, God knows we’ve all been there. But this? Starting a fight like a couple of drunks in a bar-room brawl, really? What happened between you two? What the hell have I missed?”

There’s a plea in his voice now that makes Arthur’s stomach twist, but still, he doesn’t know what to say. He barely even understands his motives himself.

“If you don’t tell him, Arthur, I will,” Ariadne cuts in then, with a low note of warning in her voice. Arthur glances to her, brow furrowing.

“Tell him what?”

“That you’re in love with--”

Quite suddenly, Arthur’s energy returns to him again. He’s on his feet in a second, which startles Dom into standing as well.

“No,” he snaps at Ariadne, with such force she actually takes half a step back, raising her hands slightly in surrender. “That’s not--” He turns back to Dom. “Eames and Tommy have-- are-- they’ve started up some kind of relationship,” he starts, gritting his teeth against the way his stomach churns at the word. “If you’ve missed it, you must be blind, because they haven’t exactly been subtle. They’re all over each other, and it’s interfering with their ability to focus. It’s twisting their interpretation of the script and it’s interfering with the production.”

He hears Ariadne stifle a sound of indignation. “It’s more than that, Arthur, and you know it.”

“No,” he insists, feeling his chest tighten alarmingly with every second that rushes past. “No. It’s them, it’s their-- it’s--”

“Arthur,” Dom says. He wishes they’d stop using his name. It feels too much like an attack. Dom’s voice has taken on the kind of tone one might use when approaching a frantic animal. He puts a hand on Arthur’s shoulder, which makes him jolt, and guides him to sit back down, which he feels powerless to resist. “I know about Tommy and Eames. They told me. I’ve talked with them about it. We’ve discussed it, and they made it clear they wouldn’t allow their relationship to interfere with the play.”

Either the room is getting smaller or Dom is somehow getting closer-- either way it’s getting harder to breathe. Arthur stares at him, eyes wide, jaw set, dragging air unevenly in and out through his clenched teeth. “No.”

“Whatever this is, whatever’s going on, we can work it out. We need to work it out. But I do not have time for fucking around.” Dom’s hand is still on his shoulder; Arthur is acutely aware of the weight of it, the heat of it. “I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

His head feels too heavy and then in the next second too light, which isn’t helped by his skull tightening, his chest closing in on him, the cold sweat prickling across the back of his neck. It’s ridiculous. He isn’t panicking. He cannot be panicking. He does not panic.

“I need a word.” Arthur wants to curl up and die when he hears that voice, as much as he wants to punch a wall. But he’s not going to act on either of those things- again- and instead swallows, turning his head from Dom’s inquisitive stare.

Eames, with tissue paper held up against his lip to stop the bleeding, is leaning against the door, Tommy at his side, hovering, but not quite touching.

Ariadne hesitates, while Arthur stays silent, and Dom is close to biting his nails in anticipation. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” she hedges.

Rolling his eyes, Eames pushes himself off the doorway, standing up straight. “Well I’m not going to punch anybody.” Arthur’s face heats with indignation, but he keeps his eyes resolutely on the floor.

“It’s fine,” he says, lifting his gaze momentarily to glance in Ariadne’s direction, reassuring her. “Seriously. Go.”

The others trickle out of the room, but Tommy lingers, just for the barest second, to level Arthur with a look that Arthur can’t hold. He turns his head away in shame and anger.

Eames moves into the room, his overt physicality filling the room at once, and he stands across from Arthur, hands dropped to his sides as he observes Arthur, sitting there in all his pity, with a kind of focal intensity Arthur hadn’t known he was capable of possessing.

“You wanted to talk,” Arthur says eventually, breaking the sullen silence that settled between them, his voice brittle, rasped. “So talk.”

Eames doesn’t rise to the bait of Arthur’s hostile words, instead straightens himself up and scuffs a toe against the ground. “I, ahm… Well, it’s come to my attention that… Oh bloody hell.” Giving up any ghost of decorum, with a loud sigh Eames pulls Dom’s abandoned chair towards him and plonks himself down on it. “I’ve been a complete and utter arsehole to you, Arthur.”

Whatever Arthur had been bracing himself for, the verbal vitriol he was prepared to deflect, it certainly wasn’t that. “I… What?”

“I’ve been a wanker, this whole time. And I’m sorry for that, Arthur truly.”

Through his shocked stupor, Arthur finds himself frowning. “Where… the fuck is this coming from?”

“From…” Eames makes a vague, impatient hand gesture. “Everything! From me blowing you off to the way I’ve responded to your actions, and never taking into account your feelings through it all- Entirely prickish of me. And I can only say sorry.” His eyes lower, his voice drops. “I am sorry, Arthur. For reacting that way with Tommy- When it was me, all along. I’m sorry. I should have taken my head out of my arse for a second.”

It was, Arthur admits to himself, partly Tommy too, but he’s not going to say that out loud. Instead he settles for “Um… Thanks. I think.”

Eames is looking at him with a sincerity that makes Arthur want to turn his face away. For all the times he’s wished the bastard would take things a little more seriously, he never quite meant like this.

“Arthur.”

Arthur stiffens as Eames reaches for him, sits back in his chair, spine straightening. Eames takes his hand anyway and he fights the urge to jerk away. This feels too much like a bedside manner. Like he’s looking for a gentle way to break bad news. Like pity.

There’s silence for an agonising few seconds before Arthur is forced to realise that Eames is waiting for him to meet his gaze. He does, keeping his own expression very carefully blank. Eames is holding his hand in both of his own, the rough pad of his thumb over Arthur’s knuckles. He’s trying not to think about it. Trying to ignore the beat of his pulse against his palm.

“I am sorry.”

“You said.”

“I was careless with you.”

Arthur almost wants to laugh, then. Care _less_ is what Eames is, as much as Arthur himself is care _ful_. They are each other’s antithesis -- it’s the only way they can stand each other, really. So if Eames is going to start apologising for being careless he might as well apologise for having his shirt untucked, or his shoes scuffed, or smelling of cheap tobacco, or being alive.

And Arthur is careful. Nobody else is supposed to have to be careful with him.

“With your feelings.”

There’s that word again, feelings. Arthur wants to scoff, and would, but he can’t seem to move. Can’t even look away from Eames’ eyes, even though his own are burning. The whole conversation seems surreal -- Eames, concerned about Arthur’s feelings, after the lengths he’s gone to cultivating the precise, careful image of not having any.

“I suppose I didn’t realise…” Eames pauses, adjusts his gentle grip on Arthur’s hand slightly; Arthur realises he must be searching for the right words to let him down easy, to be careful with him, and it makes him want to pull away all over again. It makes him faintly sick. He isn’t used to people walking on eggshells around him, and he loathes how small it makes him feel.

If Eames finishes that sentence with that you were in love with me, Arthur swears, he’s going to hit him again.

“...that what we were doing? Had? Were doing? meant…” Not more. Don’t say more. “...something different to you than it did me.”

Was that worse than more? Arthur isn’t certain. From somewhere or other he regains a little of his ability to move, and squirms. Tears his gaze away for a second only to find it dragged back again with a soft press of Eames’ hand.

“I need you to know, Arthur, I never wanted to hurt you. Never meant to hurt you.”

You couldn’t hurt me if you tried, Arthur wants to tell him, but it would be a lie.

“If I’d known--” Eames pauses again, lets out a breath. Closes his eyes for just a moment, and it feels like a disproportionately large relief, not to be looked at. “I would never have allowed it to go on the way it did.”

A part of Arthur wants to scream. Allowed it? What kind of helpless maiden does Eames think he is? But it’s as much as he can do just to grit his teeth and stare on at him.

“My feelings for Tommy-- well. Like I said. For better or for worse, wasn’t it?”

Arthur’s either going to scream, or hit him again, or throw up. Possibly all three, possibly in that order. Except he’s rooted to the chair still, and Eames is talking, still, and he can’t look away from him.

“But you, Arthur, you--” Eames smiles, then, the softest, saddest smile Arthur’s ever seen on him. It’s unbearable. “I’ll always care for you. You’ll always be one of the best men I’ve ever known. And definitely the most annoying prick I’ve ever known.”

Then Arthur does laugh. It takes him by surprise; he almost chokes on it, and it dies quickly. He bows his head, trying to pull together something, anything really to say, but before he gets there, one of Eames’ hands has left his and is cupping his jaw instead.

Eames has kissed him more times than he could possibly count, so it doesn’t feel as strange as it should, at first. He almost forgets it shouldn’t be happening, until he tastes the blood on his mouth and pulls back. Eames looks a little hurt, a little anxious. Arthur takes his hand from Eames’ grip and uses the side of his thumb to wipe away the new smear of blood from his lip, then tuck back his hair where it’s come loose across his brow.

“I….” He stops himself. He feels, somewhat, like a weight has been lifted off of his chest. The knots his heart had tied itself into, the panicked frenzy that seemed to rest, like battery acid, in his muscles, seeped slowly from him, loosened, until there was nothing. There was only Arthur and Eames, in Tommy’s cramped dressing room.

He thinks of Tommy, and how Eames is with him, gentle and careful, almost as he’s being now, and of how wrong it feels, applied to him. How out of everything Eames has said, all his attempts to console him, the only thing that has made Arthur feel remotely better was when he called him an annoying prick. Because, he realises, because that’s how it is, between them. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Arthur jerks the collar of Eames’ shirt straight before letting his hands fall to his lap. “You’re pretty fucking irritating yourself, y’know,” he says, and when he smiles, it’s only a little bit forced. Eames looks at him just a second longer, and for that second Arthur is afraid he might be going to kiss him again, or embrace him, but he doesn’t. He sits back in his chair and he laughs, as if a weight has been lifted from him, too, and Arthur shares in his relief.

“Sorry about your mouth,” he adds, after a second, gesturing. Eames waves a hand dismissively.

“No, no, don’t be. I rather think it adds to my roguish charm, don’t you?”

“You think Horatio has ‘roguish charm’?”

“It’s nothing an ice pack and a bit of makeup won’t fix, Arthur.”

Arthur slumps back too, fixing his gaze on the second hand ticking its way around his watch. They’ve spent enough time on this conversation as it is. He smooths out a minute wrinkle in the fabric of his cuff. “If only the rest of the glaring flaws in this production were so easily dealt with.”

“Arthur,” Eames tuts, from where he’s examining himself in the mirror. “ _‘How poor are they that have not patience? What wound did ever heal but by degrees?’_ You say this before every opening, and every opening always goes fine. Relax. _‘Let be.’_ ”

Arthur lets his eyes flutter shut under the heavy weight of responsibility that hangs on him, and in the cramped dressing room, Arthur’s almost inclined to listen to him.

 

* * *

 

 

As comes to no surprise whatsoever to Arthur, Eames was entirely wrong, Arthur has every right to be panicking, and this production is going to be the final nail in the coffin of his theatrical career.

All around him people are running around like headless chicken; Ariadne desperately needs a pin for her dress, the props manager has somehow managed to lose Yorick, and to top it all off, Kimber from The Times has decided to grace them with his presence.

“Why the hell didn’t you say Kimber was showing?” Dom shrieks.

“It didn’t show up in any of the research,” Arthur says tightly. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s practically your job! How hard was it to find out the critics that were coming?”

“Calm down,” he shoots back hotly. “It’s fine, okay? We’ve dealt with Kimber before.”

“Yeah and he ripped us into the fucking ground--”

Yusuf, dressed sharply in black, comes running up beside them.“We don’t have time for your mental breakdowns right now,” he interrupts. “Places in five.”

Dom lets out a string of colourful expletives and storms off to get to his seat, but not before telling Arthur what he’s going to do to him if (or when) Kimber slates the production.

 

* * *

 

  
It’s the five seconds before that are the worst, Arthur reckons. Standing in the pitch black, everything suspended around them, the curtain providing a thin veil between the audience and the players.

It’s terrifying, because it’s the point of no return. It’s the moments before total, utter vulnerability.

Arthur’s fist clenches around the die in his pocket, and he holds his breath.

 

* * *

 

  
“The audience seems to think highly of you, at least,” Arthur comments, as Tommy steps backstage, the audience still reeling from his haunted, fractured ‘to be’, and reaches for his bottle of water.

Tommy smiles drily. “At least,” he echoes.

It strikes Arthur then, with a slight twinge, that Tommy has a point. The opinion of the audience is, presumably, what a lot of actors care about the most; more than the opinions of obsequious critics, at least. He wrinkles his nose, turns back to his notes. Out of the corner of his eye he watches Tommy noncommittally adjusting his shirtsleeves.

“I suppose,” he begins, turning his pen over in his fingers. He pauses, spends a second thoroughly scratching out a word he misspelled in haste. “I’m beginning to think I might understand Dom’s line of reasoning.” He pauses again, feels Tommy lift his gaze, takes a small, small moment of pleasure from having managed to surprise him, ruffle the unruffleable. “In casting you.”

There’s quiet for a moment, apart from the muffled voices of Polonius and Ophelia carrying through the wings. “Is that so?” Tommy says, eventually. There’s a note of genuine wonder in his voice -- it’s very slight, but it’s there.

“Mm,” Arthur hums, making the sound thoughtful, not wanting to come across as overly enthusiastic. “I suppose.” He turns his pen over again. “It’s an… alternative take, certainly,” he adds, letting his tone make his feelings on alternative takes quite clear. “But I see where he’s coming from.”

Again, Tommy says nothing for a minute or two, until he’s just on the point of heading back on-stage. “Thank you, Arthur,” he says then, in that low burr, voice low in his throat in that certain way he usually seems to reserve for Eames alone: genuine, and pleased. It’s subtle, but audible still. It makes Arthur a bit uncomfortable, being so unused to hearing it directed at him. And then it’s his cue, and he goes, disappearing as the scene shifts and changes, into the black abyss of the stage.

 

* * *

 

 

Half-time is both better and worse than the few minutes before opening. People are generally more buoyed and brought down from their meltdowns, having gotten into the rhythm of it, and ready to leap into the second act with renewed faith and vigour.

Arthur rolls his shoulders, wincing at the tight knots that have built up over the course of the first act, hunched from writing notes, running furiously from one point to another and having to perform more acrobatics than necessary to get a stray dagger from where it’s wedged between the props cupboard and the wall when Hannah’s arms won’t reach it.

And through it all, keeping a watchful eye on the actors. Mouthing their words along with them, standing in the wings like a spector, trying to communicate with them silently to slow down, speed up, remember the blocking.

“Watch your timing,” he tells Nash, their Laertes. “Just remember, most of the monologues end in couplets. Listen for those. And, hey-- Ariadne, you’re doing great but watch for the thrones during the blocking.” This is where he feels most at home, though, ironically. Strung tight on adrenaline and stress, walking the fine line between the two, keeping everyone on the point.

Though hesitant as he is to admit it, they’ve had no… major cause for worry as of yet. No forgetting of lines, no one late to call, no phones going off in the middle of the scene. The actors aren’t letting first night jitters get to them too much, and while they could of course be better, they aren’t alarmingly off the mark. Tommy, surprisingly, seems to be holding out quite well. He plays belligerency very well, which comes as no surprise to Arthur. The weaving monologues and verbal traps of Hamlet’s feigned insanity are very similar to that way Tommy usually speaks, anyway. He’s keeping a tight grip on Hamlet’s disintegration, playing his downwards spiral with enough precision and practiced chaos that there’s no immediate panic for his well being. Yet.

“Arthur.”

He turns in the bustling corridor full of actors to find the source of the voice, and sees Eames, poking his head outside of a dressing room. Frowning, Arthur goes over to him.

“What do you want?”

“Tommy wants to speak with you.”

Eames’ eyes are sparked with an intense urgency, so much so that Arthur is completely speechless at the absurdity of it.

“He wants to _what_?”

“Speak with you--”

“Yeah I got that, but--”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” The brusque, burly Birmingham voice comes from inside, and suddenly Tommy appears behind Eames, glowering. “I need a word.”

Arthur blinks. Then he steps past Eames, into the dressing room.

(His mother may have raised a ‘stubborn jackass’, but a fool she did not.)

“Don’t break each other’s kneecaps,” Eames says in parting, shutting the door behind him and flouncing off somewhere. Arthur doesn’t even have it in him to be flummoxed at his disappearance, more focused on trying to stay out of the way of Tommy’s increasingly angry pacing.

“Is something the matter?” he asks. He almost wishes something was, but he cannot, for the life of him, find something worth constructive criticism that isn’t meaningless nitpicking. And he tries, he really does, but he comes up empty, and the intermission on opening night isn’t the best time for nitpicking.

“I cannot fucking hack this,” Tommy says, with a furious bite, punctuated by the sharp flick of his lighter, putting flame to the cigarette in his mouth. If this were any other time, Arthur wouldn’t think twice about plucking it from his lips and putting it out, and then an ensuing lecture on basic health. But as for right now, there’s a slowly unfurling hysteria building in Tommy, like smoldering coals, and Arthur needs to try put this out as fast as possible before he lets him out on stage again.

“Hack what?”

“ _This_!” Tommy yells, flinging a hand out. “You and Eames. Me and Eames. For fuck’s sake, Arthur, don’t think I didn’t know.”

Arthur bristles against the attack, the managed cool in his head slowly being tuned out by a bitter, acerbic static. “Know what?” he asks, reticent.

With a curt snicker, Tommy leans forward, bracing his hands on his chair. “You loved him, Arthur. Or maybe not loved, but you surely felt something, enough to kick up such a bloody ruckus about it.”

“What the fuck does it matter now?”

“It _matters_ ,” Tommy stresses, his knuckles turning white on the wooden ridges. “Because I have to be out there, on that stage, giving my fucking heart and soul to him, in front of hundreds of people, and have to ignore the fact that the man who still has feelings for him is watching five fucking feet from us.”

“It’s not the same anymore,” Arthur retorts. “Didn’t he tell you that after our enlightening conversation?”

“Of course he fucking did,” Tommy breathes. “But he doesn’t get it, Arthur.” When Tommy finally lifts his gaze from the floor, it’s filled with unbearable pity, and it turns Arthur’s insides bright red with anger. “You don’t think I know heartache when I see it?”

“And what the fuck does that matter to you? You got him, didn’t you? You win.” He snaps back. “It’s not like you’d ever deserve him, anyway.”

Tommy stands up, not looking at Arthur as he takes a long drag of his cigarette. “I know that.” He gazes at the wall, mind in that far off place he goes when memories and thought capture him. “I could live a thousand lifetimes and still not deserve him.” The gaze he fixes Arthur with could wither a king. “But that doesn’t mean you do, either.”

“I know that,” Arthur answers, fuse going short. “What the fuck is your point?”

“My point is that I can’t do this when we’ve hardly ever talked about it. Listen, just--” He holds a hand up, silencing any retort Arthur might have coming. “I love him, okay? I haven’t told him, and you’d better fucking not, but I do. You’re right, when you say he’s too good for me. He is. But still, I’m… I’m trying to be better, because of him, and I just… I needed you to know that I wasn’t taking him from you just because I wanted to, or because I thought I could.”

The moment between them, Arthur realises with a horrifying clarity, has turned sickeningly delicate and soft, without any warning.

“I’d never said that to you, because we… we don’t really do that. But I can’t go out there and die in his arms with you thinking this is some sick game to me. It’s not. It never was.”

Arthur is dumbfounded. He wonders, absently, if there was LSD in that coffee Yusuf made him before opening. “I…” he begins, opening and shutting his mouth like some kind of guppy fish. “No, I… I never thought that.” He swallows. Showing gratitude to Tommy Shelby feels like choking up something unpleasant, but he manages “Thanks, though.”

Tommy gives him a wry smile. “We don’t have to do all that, Arthur.”

“Oh, thank God.”

 

* * *

 

 

The rest of the night passes in a blur of fake blood, costume changes and soliloquies, people running to and from the stage in a dizzying frenzy.

But they made it, Arthur thinks wildly. They made it here, to the end, the very last scene. The tension has been mounting, climbing for the past three hours, and now here they are, Tommy standing centre stage, most of the cast dead around him, a fencing foil limp by his side.  
  
Arthur’s breath catches involuntarily in his throat as Tommy stumbles, catches himself, and then falls, right into Eames’ arms, following the blocking step by step-- but it flows with a smoothness, a liquidity and freelance nature to it that had never been present before.

They’ve brought it alive, Arthur thinks, dumbly. They’ve brought Shakespeare, kicking and screaming from the glass case Arthur had put him in, into the twenty-first century, and with a forceful punch to the gut they’ve reignited this age old tale and they’ve brought it alive.

“ _O,_ _I die, Horatio,"_  Tommy says, voice breathy but weighted, the fake blood on his lips smearing Eames’ cheek, a bloom of dark crimson across the white breast of his shirt as he collapses against him. “ _The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit--"_  A violent shudder, a cough, interrupts his speech and Tommy clutches desperately onto Eames’ shirt, body weeping under the poison. Eames’ face is a picture of ugly, true heartbreak as he reaches, touches, traces the planes of Tommy’s face, cradling his cheek, shushing him, trying to soothe.

Eames, cracking under the weight of Horatio’s grief, guilt, loss, lets out a muffled sob, bending his head down, bracing his forehead against Tommy’s.

Tommy lifts a free hand up, cupping Eames’ jaw in turn, creating a perfect symmetry for once in a play with so little regard for order.

“ _I_ _cannot live to hear the news from England,"_  he tells Eames’ fiercely. “ _B_ _ut I do prophesy the election lights on Fortinbras: he has my dying voice--"_  Tommy pauses, face contorting with pain as Eames breaks once more. He shushes him, grips on harder, steels himself to continue.

“ _So tell him,"_  he continues, his voice growing faint. “ _With the occurrents, more and less, which have solicited._ ” He lifts his head up, gazing at Eames. “ _The rest-- is silence."_

If you were to look closely, you could see an almost-smile on Tommy’s Hamlet, trying to reassure Horatio, take some of his pain away. And then, with the same grace with which Tommy does everything, he dies.

As his body goes limp, Eames lets out the mightiest roar Arthur’s ever heard, one he certainly kept to himself during rehearsals. His body shakes under the weight of his tears, his heartbreak, as he presses Tommy’s body close, holding him with such force and desperation that Arthur feels, deeply, that he should not be here, he shouldn’t be watching this, this is entirely too personal and too private.

When he eventually calms down, releases Tommy’s torso from his vice-like hold, he stops.

“ _And still some liquor left…,_ ” he mumbles, tracing his thumb across Tommy’s lower lip. Even here, Arthur can see the tremor in his hand. “ _Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”_

With a lone, solitary spotlight on him, and not a dry eye in the house, Eames leans down, and kisses him.

The curtain closes on Tommy and Eames splayed on the floor, in death’s eternal embrace.

Arthur holds his breath, desperate, waiting, and when the thunderous rumble of applause reverberates throughout the theatre, he closes his eyes, and smiles.

 

* * *

 

 

 **[pointman left a review on Dreamshare’s production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet]**  
_27/08/2017_

At first glance, Dreamshare’s unconventional approach to _Hamlet_ seemed as doomed as the fate of the titular tragic hero. While Ariadne Bardugo takes to Ophelia with seemingly effortless grace and skill, Thomas Shelby’s melodramatic, undisciplined performance in Macbeth was an unfortunate start to his career with the company, and as such he seemed far from the obvious choice for Hamlet.

And yet.

That seems to be the catchphrase surrounding Shelby’s rising stardom, in all my digging. “And yet, despite X, Y and Z…” While I couldn’t see it before, I certainly can now, and can hold a level of appreciation for it, as well. It’s true to say that Shelby remains melodramatic and undisciplined, and yet, his Hamlet is suited quite perfectly to it. He controls the uncontrollable in Hamlet’s descent into madness, portrays his grief in a profoundly personal and humane level that arguably, has not been seen in a _Hamlet_ production in a long, long time. But in an interesting directorial choice by Dominick Cobb, Shelby also highlights the ‘light’ within the dark heart of _Hamlet_ , playing up the comedic moments and bantering with the other actors in an entirely original, yet not unpleasant or blasphemous, way.

And it’s here that a small company originally from the underground theatres of Brooklyn root the true tragedy of _Hamlet_. It’s not sad because Hamlet is sad, because his father has died, but because despite his sadness, paranoia and hopelessness, he had reason to live. He had a loving mother, he had his Ophelia and, most stressed in Dreamshare’s production, he had Horatio.

If, like myself, you were left unsatisfied by Dreamshare’s _Macbeth_ , I encourage you to give them a second chance with this production. They have ushered Shakespeare into the twenty first century, and, whether we like it or not, this is the way theatre is going. This, I’ve come to realise, is the way it has to go, if we’re to secure it’s role for future generations.

On a personal note, I look forward to suspending my disbelief again for whatever they tackle next. With the cast they currently hold, there’s no doubt I have that each and every production will be bigger and bolder than the last.

And what’s not to say that this isn’t what the Bard himself intended? I hold too much regard for William Shakespeare and his ingenuity to believe that he could only see within the confines of his own era. To quote the man himself- _‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’_

 

* * *

 

 

**EXEUNT OMNES**


	4. EPILOGUE

The lights are dimming around them in the theatre, a hush falling over the buzz of conversation that had filled room seconds before.

Dom claps him on the shoulder one more time, a nervous tick of his, before stilling, eyes focused intently on the stage and knuckles nearly white as they grip the armrest of his seat, like a man about to go down with his ship. And, really, Arthur’s in no position to judge, because up until last year he’d been so unable to deal with the particular panic opening night brought that he opted to spend it backstage and yelling. That’s not to say that it’s completely dissipated, it still sits, right now, in the middle of his chest, causing him to buzz in his seat, but--

But.

Here he is, nonetheless.

_‘All things are ready, if our minds be so.’_

Arthur glances behind him as the lights dim, and the ushers at the back of the hall close the entrances into the auditorium. He looks at his watch, sees the minute hand tick past the hour, and feels nerves bubble up in his chest.

“Relax,” Dom whispers by his side. “He’ll show. He always does.”

The curtains rise before Arthur can answer, the spotlights rising to show Tommy and Eames, centre stage, locked in an embrace. It had been Dom’s idea to take _T_ _welfth Night_ as their next endeavour - a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of tragedy he’d trudged them through - and to completely disregard the fact that it was meant to be a Christmas play, which Arthur conceded to with no lack of grumbling.

Dom also decided, with all the pomp and pride of a dictator of a small country, that he was going to completely mess with the timeline of ‘Twelfth Night’, which Arthur conceded to after a lot more fighting and several threats of walking out, on both sides.

Though, credit where it’s reluctantly due, Arthur has come to… _appreciate_ , if anything else, Dom’s interpretation.

Tommy takes a shuddery breath, as he grasps Eames’ cheeks like a drowning man, and says, “ _If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant._ ”

Eames opens his mouth to argue and Tommy shakes his head fervently, hushing him. A watery smile graces his face, a gentle thumb strokes Eames’ cheek. “ _But come what, come may, I do adore thee so, that danger shall seem sport, and I will go.”_

Within the space of a few seconds they have the audience in the palms of their hands, breathes already baited. A little boy in the front row leans forward in his seat, mouth agape as the scene breaks, shifts and metamorphoses and moves smoothly into the depths of the first scene in earnest. It’s so immersive-- the setting, the acting, the months of hard work, seeing it finally pay off-- Arthur almost forgets his worries.

Almost.

He’s late, but to his credit, the young man who slides quietly into the seat beside Arthur’s and presses an apologetic kiss to his cheek does look immaculate, even lit only by the glow from the stage.

“So sorry, darling,” he murmurs, close enough by Arthur’s ear to make him shiver. “I just couldn’t get away.”

Arthur’s response is a soft sound of reassurance as he finds the man’s hand, threads his fingers through his own, rests them entwined on his thigh. The row creaks quietly as the man settles in beside him, but for once, for possibly the first time in his life, the sound of it doesn’t feel like nails on a chalkboard. It feels like -- reassurance. It feels like oh, there you are.

“I hope I didn’t miss much,” comes the voice in his ear again, low and smooth, as its owner runs his thumb over the back of Arthur’s knuckles. Soothing him before Arthur even realised he needed to be soothed, reading him even in the dark.

“No, no,” Arthur turns his head, eyes still on the stage, pressing the hand in his gently. “Don’t worry. We’re just getting started.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The king's a beggar, now the play is done:_   
>  _All is well ended, if this suit be won,_   
>  _That you express content; which we will pay,_   
>  _With strife to please you, day exceeding day:_   
>  _Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts;_   
>  _Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts._


End file.
